The Death of Mark O'Brien

It was an artful response to a difficult question, but the truth of the matter is that polio did and does affect the mind. It made Franklin D. Roosevelt think he could run the United States for four presidential terms, through depression and war, without killing himself. And it made Mark O'Brien think that he --- with scarcely an intact muscle in his whole body --- could live independently, on his own, and at the same time, be a reporter, a baseball fan, a publisher, a journalist, a social critic, and a poet.

He did all these things while living alone in an apartment in Berkeley. Not content with that, he went about town on a Stanford-built electric gurney. That gurney, with Mark lying there on his back, enclosed in a space-city plastic bubble, was forever and a day on the streets, O'Brien guiding the machine with his left foot. He would zoom down the sidewalk, run off the curb, and the whole thing would topple over --- dumping him out on the pavement. Somehow he would dragoon people around him into picking him up and sticking him back on his contraption, inside the cocoon, and then he would roar off again, ramming into walls and people, oblivious to the strange sight he was making in a city so used to strange sights.

That Mark was out on the streets and not hidden away in some nursing home was a testament to his Irish dander. Remember, this is a man who --- since age six --- had the use of one muscle in his left foot, one muscle in his neck, and one in his jaw. That's it. He made full use of the three. He used the foot muscle to steer his monster machine; he used the other two to bang with a stick on the keys of a computer, to write, cajole, editorialize, storm, cry, laugh, and rage. You tell me he wasn't a nut-case?

They should have applauded him --- right? Nonsense. At one point, Social Security administrators tried to take away his benefits because he wasn't keeping "appropriate records" pertaining to his attendants. They made him go through an extended hearing to keep his $400 a month. Your tax dollars at work.
§ § §
'Brien's special gift, I suspect, was his heart-stopping honesty. He wrote an article for a book of mine about sex and disability, and I felt his personal revelations --- about masturbation --- were dandy but, well, a bit too personal. I asked if he didn't want to use a pseudonym. He wouldn't hear of it.

And when he finally, at age thirty-six, had his first taste of love, with a sex surrogate, he wrote a long article about it which was published in several places, including The Sun of North Carolina. The paragraph about his looking at himself in the mirror always struck me as being one of the most poignant in all of disabled literature:
After she got off the mattress, she took a large mirror out of her tote bag. It was about two feet long and framed in wood. Holding it so that I could see myself, Cheryl asked what I thought of the man in the mirror. I said that I was surprised I looked so normal, that I wasn't the horribly twisted and cadaverous figure I had always imagined myself to be. I hadn't seen my genitals since I was six years old. That was when polio struck me, shriveling me below my diaphragm in such a way that my view of my lower body had been blocked by my chest. Since then, that part of me had seemed unreal.

He was honest about his sexuality --- and equally honest about his loneliness which, for most of the disabled, is a harsh fact of life. (There will always be something very poignant about the ad he posted on his home-page:
I am looking for an intelligent, literate woman for companionship and, perhaps, sexual play. I am, as you see, completely paralyzed, so there will be no walks on the beach.)

§ § §
'Brien left some fine presents for us. Not the anger, the one that made him write,
God damn this wall I cannot punch God damn this bat I cannot swing God damn this eucalyptus leaf I cannot pull down off a tree and hold up to my lover's nose

Once Brian did an interview with Stephen Hawking. As he was waiting, some ninny from PBS came up and asked Mark if seeing Dr. Hawking gave him hope. He wrote,
This struck me as an awfully stupid question. Hope for what? Could Dr. Hawking change my life, make me walk, get me a lover? I tried to think of a polite way to answer her. I just didn't want to get sucked into being cast as a Spokesperson for the Disabled in a dreary story headlined 'Disabled Inspired by Dr. Hawking.'

I suspect that the thing we should most value Mark for, outside of his appealing (and sometimes appalling) honesty, was his chutzpah. I am thinking about the way the interview with Hawking came about. Mark set the whole thing up, and somehow got his dreadful space-age gurney manuevered into the meeting hall at U C Berkeley where the physicist was appearing. I can almost picture it now. Hawking in his little chair, with his moveless face, and his typing-talking machine; O'Brien laid out flat on his back on his gurney, his face pressed to the side, his voice barely audible:

O'BRIEN: Do you ever feel frustration, rage at being disabled?
HAWKING: No.
O'BRIEN: Does your work help you to deal with these feelings?
HAWKING: Yes. I have been lucky. I don't have anything to be angry about.

Pure O'Brien. He wasn't interested in the stars, or in time, or even in the history of time. He was trying to get the Hawking to talk about his feelings --- to talk about this astonishing thing that had happened to his body, and what it did to his psyche. For O'Brien, and I, and all our disabled friends know that there is no one in the world, not even a mental giant like Hawking, who can lose the use of his body without having it resonant powerfully in the soul.

O'BRIEN: Doctor Hawking, what can you say to all the disabled people who are stuck in nursing homes or living with their parents or in some other untenable situation and who feel that their life is over, that they have no future?

As I heard this long question unravel like an ill-mannered ball of yarn [O'Brien wrote later], Hawking continued to look at me and typed his answer into the voice synthesizer. I couldn't see his right hand, the one he used to type. I waited. All of us waited. Then the silence was cracked by the voice synthesizer's crisp, booming voice.

HAWKING: It can be very difficult. I know that I was very fortunate. All I can say is that one must do the best one can in the situation in which one finds oneself.

The good doctor left him in the lurch, didn't he? Refused to show even a teeny bit of what they call "emotion" or "feeling." O'Brien blew it, didn't he?
Maybe. Except for the fact that those of us who have long ago penetrated that ghastly myth of Disabled-Courage-Against-All-Odds know that O'Brien was onto something --- something to teach the teacher. Something that (perhaps) Hawking, if he is lucky, has, by now, finally figured out.
That it hurts. And there doesn't have to be any shame in that hurt.
§ § §
f we were to do something silly like try to create an epitaph for Mark, I probably would not dwell on his books, or his angry articles about Kevorkian, or his fine baseball stories, or even the 1997 Oscar --- that wonderful present for him and Jessica Yu and his movie, Breathing Lessons.
I would, rather, choose to engrave, on the stone, a poem --- one he wrote ten years ago, entitled, with typical (and delicious) O'Brien-esque irony, Lifestyles of the Blind and Paralyzed:
The pay is lousy,
no vacations or sick leave,
and the compliments...
You'd rather do without them.
On the plus side,
you're exempt from military service,
get to watch lots of TV
and pay half price at the movies.
They're out there, my public,
dying to ask me what happened to you,
wondering how I pee
and using me as proof
that God is just
and punishes only the wicked.
--- L. W. Milam
[Reprinted with permission of
"Salon Magazine," Summer, 1999]