The Prisoner of Vandam Street Read Online Free PDF Page B

your sleeve by the time you’ve rolled your pathetic way down a few of life’s long, crowded, smelly corridors. The person pushing the chair can never know what it’s like until he’s rolled a mile on your wheels. That’s why he’s so friendly and fucking cheerful all the time. It makes you want to kill him, or at least hurt him enough to put him in the horsepital so he can see what it’s like to be in this stupid fucking wheelchair with some high-minded asshole who probably thinks he’s saving the world pushing you down the fucking street. Most people in wheelchairs are, I believe, pretty much thinking thoughts along these lines. Fortunately, they’re in wheelchairs, so they can’t hurt us. It’s when they get better and become ambulatory again that the rest of us pedestrians have to be careful. Happily, by then they’ve usually forgotten their bitter, twisted, vengeful wheelchair thoughts, and they go about their normal activities, which are often composed of cheerfully pushing the rest of us around in wheelchairs. People who are permanently confined to wheelchairs are a still more dangerous animal, of course. They resent you for your ambulatory abilities which you take totally for granted and they would definitely kill you in a heartbeat if their physical impairments didn’t preclude them from doing so. They’ve had a lot of time to think about it, time to stew in their own juices, so to speak, and if given the slightest opportunity, with or without provocation, they will attempt to trick you, or trip you, or poison you, or kill you by some extremely well-thought-out and viciously nefarious means, such as unscrewing the rotor on your new Sharper Image nose-hair clipper.
    “How in the hell am I supposed to hail a taxi at the same time I’m pushing this wheelchair?” said McGovern in a tone of deep frustration.
    “Tom Hanks is made of cat shit,” I said.
    “That’s enough of that cat shit shit,” said McGovern rather peevishly. “You’re not delirious anymore. It’s just an attention-getting device. You’re doing this to irritate people.”
    “What’s wrong with that?” I asked rationally.
    “Nothing,” said McGovern, “except in this case the people you’re irritating is me and I’m pushing the fucking wheelchair and you’re pushing me to the point where I just might push it into the goddamn street!”
    “C’mon, McGovern, you don’t have to feel this way. Go to the happy place.”
    “Fuck you and the wheelchair you rode in on,” said McGovern.
    While McGovern and I were dealing with our logistical and interpersonal problems, Ratso, who might have provided a fairly adequate buffer, was nowhere in sight. I soon was to learn that he’d taken the key to the loft and headed down to Big Wong’s in Chinatown where he’d stocked up on approximately six weeks’ worth of takeout Chinese food. I like Big Wong’s almost as much as Ratso, but I thought this to be somewhat excessive, especially when I realized that he’d billed all of it to me. But I’m getting a little bit ahead of myself in my wheelchair here.
    McGovern and I were now seriously involved in the business of finding a taxi. Taxis are plentiful in New York. If, indeed, you’re crazy enough to drive a vehicle in the city, you’ve probably noticed yellowish scratches and indentations on the car’s finish which we often refer to as “taxi juice.” There are times when you can see whole fleets of yellow taxicabs moving inexorably down the avenues like Panzers into Poland. There are only two occasions when it’s impossible to find a cab in New York: when it’s raining and when you’re in a wheelchair.
    “Shit,” said McGovern. “It’s starting to rain.”

Chapter Eight
    I won’t go into the tedium, ennui, and pure hell we experienced, first merely finding a cab, and then trying to fit a large Irishman, a malaria patient, and a collapsible wheelchair that wouldn’t collapse all into a tiny yellow cab that was driven