The Intake Interview
THEY REMIND ME of IRS auditors, "implementing policy,
"expediting paperwork" with an
earnest, blockheaded zeal that confounds me, makes me want to laugh,
cry, scream.
I don't buy their occasional self-deprecating
apologies for "all the red tape," no, not for one minute. They believe
in it. It is this belief that gives rise to their placid sadism, that fundamentally
divides me from them, a division as deep, it seems to me now, as that between
poor and rich. They believe in the inevitability (and therefore the necessity)
of their piles of forms full of prying, suspicious questions.
The questions are endless. The ones they already
asked over the phone they ask again, along with an infinity of others.
There's a numbing list of documents to be compiled and fur nished to my
counselor" (she's going to counsel me?), demonstrating that
I am who I say I am (social security card), was born when I say I was born
(birth certificate), reside where 1 claim to reside (driver's license,
car registration, utility bills), and am in fact truly disabled (complete
medical records, including surgical reports, names and addresses of all
doctors who ever treated me for my Disabling Condition, a recent letter
from my current doctor affirming that I am indeed still disabled). I must
furnish proof that I am Employable and that I have not set my Vocational
Goals too high (full job history, including the exact nature of my assignment
at each job, how long I held the post, what I earned, why I left).
Have I ever been diagnosed as having a mental or
emotional disorder? Any history of substance abuse?
Have I been hospitalized for mental or emotional
disorders or substance abuse?
In treatment now? For what? Take any meds?
Ever been arrested? Convicted? Of what?
What are my personal-care needs? Have I ever required
any "special accommodations" on the job? What were they?
Am I Certified Disabled?
I ponder the source from which these questions spring.
Prizing open the skull of this genial, neatly groomed woman who faces me-her
desk a sort of shield to keep me from advancing too close- I find a cluster
of assumptions: (1) The client-applicant is ineligible for services
until proven eligible. (2) The client-applicant's Vocational Goals
are outlandish, greedy, arrogant, must be trimmed down to appropriately
humble scale. (3) The client-applicant's motive in seeking services is,
until proven otherwise, to rip off the system. (4) The function of the
Agency is to facilitate (favorite word) adaptation (second favorite) of
client to job (client to world), not the reverse. (5) The client is a fraud.
(6) The client is helpless.
Most pervasive of all, this last; its condescending
flicker turns up everywhere. Peel back the protestations of the most dedicated,
selfless, even noble social worker, and there it 15: the client is helpless.
Help the client. (See Spot run.)
I sit, politely answering my counselor's questions.
Somewhere in the large, low-ceilinged, factorylike space, subdivided by
cheap modular partitions into dozens of small work are~s, a copy machine
hums, a typewriter clatters. Low murmur of indistinguishable voices from
adjacent stalls. Smells of copy machine fluid and Mrs. Lowery-the-Counselor's
hair spray.
I try to focus, but my mind strays to the others,
glimpsed in passing (I asked directions to the bathroom in order to see
what I could along the way), sitting opposite their own counselors in their
own separate cubicles. (Undergoing their own Intake Interviews?) Patient
bewilderment sags their shoulders. I search their expressions and what
I see is offense, as if someone has just deliberately burped in their faces
and they, embarrassed, taken aback, too dignified or fearful to return
the insult, carefully pretend it was a sneeze: God bless you, they
say.
So much hanging in the balance: a piece of equipment,
a training program, something so costly one could save for years and never
afford it. The distribution of power so terribly skewed, and so consistent
in its terribleness: people in wheelchairs beseeching people who walk~
people who can't hear beseeching people who can. Entr~ting not for a place
in the sun but for crumbs, crumbs left on someone else's plate: If there's
enough money in the budget after we buy our new computer, we'll see about
your college education.
And how many will be persistent and resourceful
enough to survive this paralyzing gauntlet? (If they weren't Certified
Disabled when they came in, they will be when they leave.) How many will
stay with it and assemble all the necessary documents, believing in their
hearts that they're deserving, cleaving to this faith, undaunted
even by the Agency's most degrading questions? The coveted equipment, the
training program transmuted into handouts, not entitlements. And who would
quarrel with that most fundamental code of justice: For handouts, you
gotta scrape.
. . . . . . . .
Mostly it's been a hard and lonely private struggle,
though, since until recently I counted among the people close to me no
disabled women who could provide role models, in terms of helping me carve
out for myself a new sexual identity. When I found them-my new friend Sheba
and others, gay and straight, whose manner and bearing sent a clear message
--I know my own worth, and those who choose not to see it are the losers--
they served as beacons for me. My presence, my personal way of being in
the world, underwent a sea change.
It had to do with how they held their heads. How
some women in manual chairs jumped curbs, practical, preoccupied with getting
from here to there. (It wasn't the wheelies themselves, athleticism
per se has no hold on me. It was that style!) How they entered rooms
full of non-disabled people sitting straight, as if they had a right. How,
breathing into fat-ribbed respirator tubes, certain quadriplegic women
paused to smile. How respirator breathing could seem suddenly sexy in a
way that dragging on Virginia Slims never would, when at the end of that
tube there flashed the briefest, most spectacular of smiles.
Mark, it was the Respirator Women who gave me permission
to have a disability, whose casual grace finally shamed me into ownership.
The Respirator Women, whose heads didn't move, nor their pinky fingers,
nor their toes, had minds that did. Oh the tragedy, I used
to whine inwardly, thinking myself empathetic, until a Respirator Woman
grinned. Imagine, I would brood, being trapped inside a body
(standard pop media fare, that; I didn't know better)-----until a Respirator
Woman winked at me.
What was that wink saying? What an interesting business,
I decided it said, meaning life. It might even have been saying, What
fun. Either way it posed problems. How could life be interesting, let
alone fun, for trapped people? They must be fooling themselves, or perhaps
I was misreading those sassy grins. But how could I be that far off? Clearly
they were not saying Poor me, which is what the media seemed to
be saying they were saying, or rather, seemed to feel they should
be saying.
(Actually, the more I think about it, the more it
appears to me that the media wants it both ways. Journalists, TV and film
directors, and screenwriters seem to want to do poor-them stories ad nauseam
about the Respirator Women, but woe unto her who actively solicits this
response. Self- pity is unseemly, not to mention tacky, when publicly displayed.
It strikes me now as not unlike-- you'll appreciate the analogy--our culture's
old sexual double standard toward women, i.e., we're attractive only so
long as we re "innocent"; if we try to be sexy, we deserve whatever
we get.)
. . . . . . .
Shall I tell you a little story, Mark? Some time
ago, on a long train ride, I met an awed couple who later confessed that
they'd made a point of introducing themselves to me in order to find out
if I was "for real." "You don't seem handicapped," they said, thinking
themselves complimentary--can you beat it?--going on to explain that while
they'd seen lots of TV productions about "courageous people who've overcome
their handicaps, who can do any-thing," they'd "never really met one in
person.
"Till there was youuuu"' I barely stopped myself
from crooning. Irrepressible (and unfair, Peter tells me) ridicule foamed
like acid in my mouth; I wanted to squash their cheap idolatry and rub
it in their placid faces. Nondisabled people seem obsessed with this moral
principle that we should "overcome" our disabilities, as if we live our
whole lives locked in mortal combat with our bodies. As for me, I'm mostly
content with mine, which is not to deny that I live a life of perpetual
active combat, but rather to say that my body is the least of my
adversaries.
People who "can do anything." Well well. My admirers
had met their first Supercrip. What exactly had they observed me doing
that made them think I could do anything?
Let's see. First of all, I got on the train. Given
the inaccessibility of that train (in violation of federal law), getting
on meant asking for help. Did that qualify me as Supercrip?
Combat, to be sure. . . But with whom, over what?
Later, stomach growling, I asked the porter about
meals. He mentioned the dining car, fourteen cars away. I asked if a meal
could be delivered to my seat and he assured me that it could, for an additional
fee of only three-fifty. My choices seemed clear: pay the service fee (I
didn't have it, and wouldn't have paid it if I had), or refuse to pay on
the grounds that it discriminated against people whocouldn't get to the
dining car. (The train's aisles were too narrow for wheelchairs-not that
they could have boarded in the first place-and fourteen jerking, jiggling
cars was far too long and hazardous a hike for someone on crutches.)
But taking such a stand on a disability matter was
not (yet) my style; besides, nothing on the short take-out list appealed
to me. (Many items on the regular menu were not considered take-out foods.)
I was seething, though hardly a disability rights crusader at the time,
I knew even then that I had a right to order whatever I damned well pleased
on that menu.
Leave it to me to be stirred to revolution by matters
of food.
My third option, and the one I finally chose, was
to find a way down to the dining car. Never having been in or even seen
one, I found this choice by far the most appealing, evoking Cary Grant
scenes of conviviality, romance. It should be noted that my Pullman car
had been booked not for luxury's sake-I was living on welfare at the time,
so a friend footed the bill-but out of medical necessity: a Pullman gave
me my only chance to elevate the bad leg. Still, I fell in love with that
car---its leather seats, its exotic smell of privilege---for the first
three hours or so, until I began to feel that oppressive loneliness that
too often seems to accompany "medical necessity." Lap of luxury notwithstanding,
my Pullman cut me off from everyone else on that train. By dinnertime it
had begun to feel like solitary confinement, I was desperate for another
human face.
Hence my determination to get to the dining car.
And get there I did, carried high above the narrow aisles of fourteen cars
by strong and chivalrous passengers. (Transit employees were instructed
not to get involved, for liability reasons.)
A set of ordinary impulses-to travel by public transportation,
to eat in a public place-were insultingly thwarted, leading me to a set
of equally ordinary emotional responses which in turn led me to act. Which
so impressed these people that they concluded I could "do anything."
PASSING
You don't seem handicapped,
she said. You seem like an ordinary
person who just happens to be sitting
in a chair with wheels instead of legs.
You look like any minute you'll
get up and walk away from it,
like you just sat down in it
for a moment's leisure in your busy
day. You look like being handicapped
is just one part of you, like being
blonde. You don't look like you've taken
root in that chair, like some fungus
has attached you to the seat. You look
like you have better things to do
with your life than sit around
in a wheelchair feeling sorry
for yourself. You look like someone
who eats eggs and toast in the morning,
not intravenous protein. You look
mainstream, you look cool. Your body
looks whole, and your mind.
You don't drool, jerk,
or twitch. You don't embarrass
us or make us feel guilty.
You don't make our skin crawl.
If you sat in a regular chair,
you could pass.