Sex,
Drugs, and Braille
I have a thing for blind people.
“Everybody’s got a thing,” says Stevie Wonder, but I don’t think he’s
talking
about the same thing I’m talking about. I think he’s talking about sex.
My
thing isn’t sexual and I’ve never actually had sex with a blind person,
though
I did come pretty close once with that blind marketing executive at
Kurzweil I
used to work for who sold reading machines to blind people. Mostly she
sold
them to libraries and colleges and government agencies, because
Kurzweil
Reading Machines cost fifty thousand bucks a pop back then, and you had
to be a
super-rich blind person to be able to afford one. She did sell one to
Stevie
Wonder, though.
She was very attractive and spent most of
her time on the phone talking to her customers while worrying the
second button
of her blouse with her thumb and forefinger. I was her part-time
assistant and
I spent most of my time staring at her while fingering the braille on
her desk
and wondering if I would ever get the chance to meet Stevie Wonder, and
if I
did, would I have the nerve to ask him about the meaning of the words
in that
song.
But before I got that job at Kurzweil, I
was young and horny and unemployed and I smoked a lot of pot and I had
only one
saleable skill: I knew braille. How I learned braille was I met this
blind guy
from Brazil who had diabetic retinopathy and liked to smoke pot and
lived on
the third floor of my apartment building. He was here in the States on
a
student visa to learn braille and mobility and ADL skills (which means
Adult
Daily Living skills, which I hadn’t yet learned myself) at the Carroll
Center
for the Blind in Boston. Edgardo Pereira was his name. He was my first
blind
guy. He used to get his pot sent over from Sao Paolo. It was really
good stuff.
I was vegging out in my ground-floor
apartment one mildewy fall afternoon with nothing to do and nada to
smoke,
looking around desultorily for an orphaned roach in the ashtrays, when
I caught
the unmistakable scent of cannabis coming from somewhere out in the
hallway. I
could hear a sort of clicking-sweeping-whacking sound interspersed with
merdas and when I opened the door to
my
apartment, there was this blind guy with a joint in one hand and a
stick in the
other (I would later learn that the stick is properly called a cane)
hopelessly
lost in the infinity of the vestibule.
When I opened the vestibule door, he
thanked me profusely and offered me the joint, which I sucked
vigorously for
ten or twenty seconds, then, with popping eyes and farting lips, tried
to give
back to him. But this was made complicated by the fact that he was
blind. I
held it out to him but he just stood there with his chin resting
serenely on
the handle of his white cane. “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” he asked, as
if he
could see it--as if he could see the day. The joint he couldn’t see,
that much
was plain, because I was holding it up to him and waving it in front of
his
face, and when he didn’t reach for it I figured what the hell and I
took a few
more hits. Behind
him, in the yard
outside the vestibule, there was a maple tree with its pants down
around its
ankles, bare but for the red and orange leaves clinging to its lower
branches
and pooled on the ground all around it.
“My name is Edgardo,” he said. “Do you
live in this building?” His English was excellent, with a charming
tinge of
foreignness, the faintly drum-rolled r’s, the occasional Portuguese
diphthongs.
“Here
ya go,” I said, having finally
figured out that using my voice was the only way to get him to see that
I was
handing him back his joint. He immediately reached his hand out in the
direction of my voice, and it felt a little like a moon landing or the
delicate
maneuvering of a cargo ship trying to attach to a dorsal port of the
space
station as my thumb and forefinger floated toward his thumb and
forefinger in
space and the handoff was accomplished, quite seamlessly actually. I
was
impressed. I was also already a little stoned. “Yes,” I said, pointing
to my
door, “I live right there. In 1A.”
“Then we’re neighbors,” he concluded,
smiling big, holding his hand out again, this time for me to shake it,
“I’m in
3B.” And in that moment, the thing I have for blind people was born: I
liked
this guy. I was immediately attracted to him, not in a sexual way, but
in a blind
way, though I couldn’t have said what it was exactly, watching him
puffing that
bone with his eyes squinting slightly against the smoke, the two of us
still
standing there in that vestibule doorway with nothing between us but a
diminishing roach and a long white cane which I felt a faint tug of
desire to
take from him, to hold in my own hands and try out myself, to share
with him
the way we were sharing his joint.
Over the course of the next twelve
months, Edgardo would share much with me. His cane, his elbow, some
tips on
sighted guide technique, his braille books, his booze, his pot, some
excellent
coke he got from (see above) Sao Paolo, and his wife Cinzia, though he
didn’t
actually share her with me--she was the one who shared herself with
me--that
night he passed out in his favorite chair after one too many, and her
dark eyes
met mine as if for the first time.
Braille is dots in a cell. Lots and lots
of cells. Each cell has six dots, like a building with six rooms in it.
There
are three floors per building, and two rooms per floor. So if Edgardo
and
Cinzia are in their third floor apartment, each in a different room,
and I am
on the ground floor, whacking off in the west room, that would be the
letter M,
which all alone, stands for the word MORE:
0 0
.
.
0 .
If
later I am whacking
off in the east room and Cinzia and Edgardo are still upstairs on the
third
floor in their separate rooms, that would be the braille contraction
SH, which
all alone, stands for the word SHALL:
0 0
.
.
.
0
If in the middle of the night, Cinzia
shall creep softly down the stairs to my apartment and the two of us
shall be
conjoined in the east room while Edgardo is sleeping alone up on the
third
floor in the west room, that would be the braille contraction CH, which
all
alone stands for the word CHILD:
0 .
.
.
.
0 Needless
to say,
braille is complicated, and it’s very hard to learn, and though Edgardo
never
quite mastered it, I eventually became an expert at it myself.
It was with Edgardo’s encouragement that
I signed up for a correspondence course in braille transcription
through the
Hadley School for the Blind. They sent me a box that contained a
braille slate
and stylus, a ream of braille paper, a wooden braille eraser (for
flattening
out erroneous dots), a braille textbook published by the Library of
Congress,
and a pile of Free Matter for the Blind labels, because the blind ride
free
with the USPS. The first five lessons required me to punch dots into
the thick
braille paper with the pointy end of the stylus, going from right to
left--backwards--making the mirror image of each character so that when
I
turned the paper over the dots would then appear in their proper
configurations
and order, going left to right. It was kind of dizzying at first, all
those
backwards, mirrored braille dots in their different combinations, and
the many
contractions, not to mention all the punctuation marks and formatting
signs.
The Hadley School made you learn braille inside out and backwards and
forwards
before they finally let you graduate to a Perkins Braille Writer, a
kind of
typewriter with six keys--one for each dot--and a space bar. The
Perkins is
heavy, clunky, and very durable, and after my fifth lesson they sent me
one in
a big box--they sent it Free Matter--and I didn’t have to do it
backwards
anymore after that. In fact, after that, all went swimmingly forward in
the
braille department. Cinzia and I continued to trade pregnant glances
and I
continued sending my lessons off to Winnetka, Illinois, where my
braille
instructor--an ardent woman named Ingrid whom I never met in person,
because it
was all done through the mail--corrected my braille sentences and sent
them
back to me with her pithy transcriber’s notes, my mistakes circled in
red.
Speaking of mistakes, I felt like a heel
as I continued to offer Edgardo my elbow, guiding him through the world
without
him knowing what had passed between Cinzia and me. I wondered if he
suspected
anything. “Do you like Cinzia’s cooking?” he asked me once as we were
walking
together to the Stop & Shop on Brookline Avenue to do some
grocery
shopping.
“Sure,” I said, slowing down to navigate
him around some toppled garbage cans, “she’s a great cook.”
“She does all the cooking,” he explained,
“and I do all the dishes. That’s the compromise. It’s important, in a
marriage,
to compromise, don’t you think?” And he squeezed my elbow meaningfully,
two or
three short squeezes. I said yes, I did think compromise was important
in a
marriage, and then we walked a half a block or so in stony silence.
Finally, he
cleared his throat and began telling me slowly, earnestly, about the
sensuality
of the dishes. Doing the dishes, he said, was a deeply satisfying and
tactile
act that he had never really fully appreciated until he got married. “I
love
the warm water on my hands and wrists. It’s kind of--I don’t
know--sexy.
Sometimes it makes me want to pee. Is that weird?” I felt a little
uncomfortable with the direction this conversation was going, and I was
relieved when about two blocks away from the Stop & Shop he
fished another
joint out of his jacket pocket and, mid-sentence, expertly lit it with
a
lighter in his right hand while holding onto my right elbow with his
left,
continuing all the while to talk. “I can feel the tiny bits of food
stuck to
the plates as I rinse them. I pick at them with my nails, and it
satisfies me
in a way that’s hard to describe. Like scratching an itch. I can tell
by
feeling it when each plate is completely clean. I search every square
inch of
the plate’s smooth skin, then rinse it and put it in the rack. And then
I feel
kind of cleansed myself. It’s good for the soul, I think, to do the
dishes,” he
said, and passed me the joint, just as we were nearing the rows of
nested
shopping carts outside the Stop & Shop.
In the catalog of bad decisions I have
made in my lifetime, this next one is surely among the top entries.
With
Edgardo at my elbow, I walked into the Stop & Shop holding the
lit joint
cupped in my hand. I think, in my stoned thinking, I was thinking that
in my
role as sighted guide I was somehow either above the law or below the
radar,
somehow either immune or waived or completely invisible, like Edgardo
was the
perfect blind, like no one would suspect it’s the guy guiding the blind
guy
whence the sweet familiar reek of cannabis filling the entire
supermarket was
emanating. They busted us on the cusp of aisle three, two managers in
suits and
a butcher in a white coat splattered with blood, swooping down on us in
the
produce section. I had the foresight, however late, to ditch the roach
in a
pyramid of fruit when I saw them coming--lemons--then puckered my lips
in a
sort of embouchure of innocence. “I have no idea what you’re talking
about,” I
protested as they roughly escorted me escorting Edgardo right out the
door and
into the parking lot. Banned for life from the Stop & Shop, we
stood there
in shock, our buzz completely ruined.
“I thought you put it out before we went
in! What were you thinking?”
I
didn’t tell him what
I was thinking, about him being the perfect blind and me being the
untouchable
teflon sighted guide, because now, walking home with him squeezing my
elbow, so
close to me that I could feel his exasperated, hurt breathing on the
back of my
neck, I began to feel just a little ashamed.
ENOUGH
is dots 2 and 6.
Cinzia pausing on the second floor landing, having second thoughts, me
lying
awake downstairs in the east room, waiting for her.
. .
0 .
. 0 My
study of braille had
progressed. I had started on the lower-cell contractions. HIS. WAS.
ENOUGH. And
INTO, which, interestingly, in braille, always attaches to the
subsequent
character. Many things in nature attach to the subsequent character.
Barnacles.
Burrs. Baby sloths. And certain lower-case braille contractions. In a
way,
Cinzia was a subsequent character, and I was an INTO. I was INTO her
and I
couldn’t stop attaching to her, even though I knew it was wrong.
Because her
breasts were small she never wore a bra and you could always see her
nipples
straining against her shirt or her shift or her dress like two
perfectly
aligned braille dots on either end of the page of her, and even when we
were
out in public I felt an irresistible urge to touch them. They were like
braille
in public places that I sometimes see and want to touch, in elevators,
on ATMs,
on signage, meant only for the fingers of a blind person, and in this
case a
very specific blind person named Edgardo. But her nipples called to me,
the way
braille in public places still calls to me, saying ‘Touch me, I know
you want
to.’ Saying, ‘What would you say if I told you I’ve never been touched
in my
life by anyone who understood me?’
And that’s the thing about braille in
public places: blind people don’t know it’s there half the time because
it’s
usually at eye level where they’d never think to look, and so their
fingers
never find the dots and the dots spend their lives straining against
the sheer
blouse of the world, just dying to be touched by someone who can
understand
them, begging to be apprehended.
I continued to apprehend Cinzia’s
nipples, but more and more at a distance now, because she had begun to
distance
herself from me, especially as Edgardo’s diabetes grew worse. Soon his
kidneys
began to fail and she was accompanying him to dialysis three days a
week. I saw
less and less of them then, but sometimes, lying on my bed, I could
hear them
leaving early in the morning, the click-sweep of Edgardo’s cane and the
rolled
r’s and Portuguese diphthongs of their shared conversations coming to
me from
out in the vestibule. After the front door would close, I’d lie there
shamelessly touching myself in my east room, fantasizing about her,
imagining
her nipples brushing up against her shirt, then up against the whorl of
my
index finger, me reading her nipples with my fingers, then my lips,
then my
tongue, coaxing them erect as I grew erect myself.
That fantasy was prompted not only by her
nipples, but also by an article I’d recently read about a quadriplegic
blind
boy who had learned to read braille with his lips. There was a
photograph of
him reading, pursing his lips up against the white page of the braille
book.
Heartbreaking, I thought. And yet, so resilient, so triumphant: he
could
actually read that way. I was inspired to try it myself with a page of
one of
my braille lessons. First I read the line with my eyes, so I knew what
I was
looking for, then I closed my eyes and held the page to my lips like a
big
white napkin against my face, pouting slightly against the dots,
rubbing them,
kissing them, trying to make them out, to drink them in like that. But
I
couldn’t do it; I couldn’t recognize any of the letters. It felt like
one vast
expanse of undifferentiated goose bumps. I opened my eyes then, and
tried to
read the same line with my finger. But I couldn’t do that either;
couldn’t
really distinguish the shapes of the letters tactilely--though I could
do it
visually, because the dots cast a tiny shadow and you can see them,
kind of
like the view from an airplane flying over a country of igloos.
Edgardo never did master braille. He and
Cinzia moved back to Brazil after the third amputation. This little
piggy, then
his neighbor, then the whole damn block up to the knee. Diabetic
neuropathy.
And we lost touch. And I still haven’t forgiven myself. But I have kept
in
touch with the braille. There is that. And I can finally read it now
with my
finger, after several years of practice, mostly in my car while driving
to
work. I stayed on at Kurzweil for a year or so, but when it became
clear that
me and that blond blind marketing executive weren’t on the same
page--she was
all about optical character recognition and speech output, while I was
and
still am all about braille--I left that job for a position as braille
transcriber at the National Braille Press. I love reading braille while
driving
to work at the braille press everyday, eyes on the road, left hand on
the
wheel, right hand skimming the dots. I have a subscription to Syndicated Columnists Weekly that I keep
within reach on the passenger seat beside me for just that purpose.
Could I be
the only person on the face of the planet who reads braille while
driving his
car? Yes, I believe I could be. But is it dangerous? No more dangerous
than
driving while listening to books on tape or eating a pastrami sandwich
on rye.
But is it illegal? No, it’s not illegal either, because our esteemed
lawmakers
and constabularies can’t conceive of it. Who can conceive of a man
reading
braille while driving his car to work? Who can imagine me driving down
I-95 at
70 mph, eyes on the road, left hand on the wheel, right hand deep in
Dear Abby? Paul
Hostovsky's latest book is The Bad
Guys (2015, FutureCycle Press). He is the author of seven
books of poetry
and six poetry chapbooks. His poems have won a Pushcart Prize, two Best
of the
Net awards, and have been featured on Poetry Daily, Verse Daily, and
The
Writer's Almanac. He makes his living in Boston as a sign language
interpreter
and braille instructor. Visit him at www.paulhostovsky.com |