I normally do not laugh in the face of others and their defeat but in all seriousness, this guy had it coming to him. I’m just glad I had the strength to wait until I was in the privacy of my own home before I laughed myself into tears.
Let me tell you the story:
I went to the corner store for just a moment. I have taken this journey countless times and have referred to the corner store in many previous posts in this blog. But I left even before it got remotely dark.
What should have taken only up to ten minutes from the time I left to the time I returned home, ended up being a forty-five minute lesson of humility for another person.
The sidewalks are not level all the way through from point A to point B. There is one part in the sidewalk where its so uneven that I must push the wheelchair to where the front wheels come up for a split second then come back down, then motion pulls me upwards until I have reached level ground again. Probably about a two inch difference. So yeah, I had to pop a wheelie. Not that big of a deal to me.
So some kids were walking behind me and saw the front of the wheelchair lift up, come back down and my butt was up in the air for a second and then level. For whatever reason they found it necessary to catch up to me and ask me how I did such a crazy stunt.
I did try to explain it in simple terms. But I think that they were expecting some radical “X Games” response from me. The kid that was asking me had about three other buddies with him and they all hovered around me to hear my story of how I can just blast off down the road and do such awesome and crazy things in my wheelchair.
I guess I sounded really boring to them. But one kept insisting that I teach him how to pop a wheelie. When I saw that my instructions were falling upon either deaf or ignorant ears, I decided to just let it go and continue on my way home. The kid didn’t like that.
So in front of his buddies, he challenges me. Whomever can do the most wheelchair stunts and tricks wins. And whomever does the best stunts will also win. Needless to say that his buddies was going to be the judge in all of this.
This is how it worked. It was like a game of “HORSE”. The first person did something, and the second had to follow and match it. I went first. I mean, after all- they did insist that I go first. And plus I was already in the wheelchair.
So I started off easy and popped back on this wheelie and sat there hanging in the for about what I counted ten or fifteen seconds. Then I came back down to all wheels on the ground.
Then I came off the curb nice and slow. I steadied myself using my foot beneath me so that I would not lose my balance. The “judges” called it cheating.
After that I hopped back ON to the curb. It was a bit of a struggle and took a few attempts but I did it.
And then, I went back on a wheelie again and spun in a complete circle. I could hear the jeers and boos from the “judges” as they just were not impressed. Even the other kid who had challenged me started taunting about how pathetic I was being.
Then we went on to the property where I live. Up the hill I went and turned around at the top. They laughed and laughed and laughed at me as I kept going so slowly up that hill.
What they did not realize is that there’s a crossroads in the middle of the sidewalks and its in the middle of the hill. I went screaming down the hill again and pulled a sharp left and kept going. I heard one of them say, “Oh shit!”. So I think at least one of them saw that they truly were biting off more than they could chew and recognized that their mouths had a broken filter when they were bragging.
Now I came back to my place and grabbed a second wheelchair because I was not going to allow this kid to do anything damaging to the one that I use every day. He said he didn’t care which wheelchair he got to use. Maybe he should have because what happened next was a textbook example of why you should keep your mouth shut.
The kid knew that he had to jump off the curb and then jump back on again. What does he do? He takes a running start at the edge and then just DROPS to the street, racking his own balls in the process. He sat there with his hands between his legs for several moments before he moved again. As the saying goes, “Gravity is a bitch!”.
Then he had to get back on the curb again. He struggled worse than I did. Finally, he almost made it. He was half on and half off the sidewalk. Then he did the worst thing possible. He leaned back. Before any of his buddies could blink, he flipped backwards and tumbled out of the chair and into the street.
I suddenly felt this stare on me. All of his buddies were looking at me to see how I would react to this guy’s failure to come back onto the curb. I sat there, not saying a word. I didn’t even laugh. But I was cracking up hysterically on the inside. He hadn’t even tried to pop a wheelie, which is something he was wanting to learn how to do in the first place!
Eventually he gathered himself to sit there. With his back matching the pain to his groin, he decided that he should try to pop a wheelie. On the third attempt, he was successful. I was about to give him a bit of praise about it. But that was just before he became overwhelmed with accomplishment, held up by the cheers and applause of his buddies, which caused him to go into a double fist pump of victory into the air with his arms over his head.
When he let go of the wheels, he fell backwards. Completely tipped over!
I think that by that point, he was finished. It didn’t seem like he had the fire in his eyes to outshine what I had done. But his lack of strength to hold up to peer pressure caused him to continue.
He never did try the stunt of popping a wheelie and spinning in one complete circle. Some how, he missed that one. Instead, we got back on property and he had to push himself up that hill and get to the top. Of course it took him longer to do it than I did. And his buddies even came up from behind him and helped him push. I knew that if I had cried FOUL on that, that they were going to ignore it. After all, the judging was a bit one-sided.
He had sat back and let them do all the dirty work of going uphill. But what he did not realize is that they had stopped pushing him and let him go on his own.
Remember that scene in “Forrest Gump” where Forrest meets up with Lt. Dan outside the TV studio in the cold and Lt. Dan ends up losing control of the wheelchair and slides backwards until he has presumed to have crashed at the bottom of the ramp? Yep. That’s what happened to this guy. He started sliding backwards down that hill again and he freaked out and for the third and fourth time had fallen out of the wheelchair. By then, he had a nasty little scratch on his knee.
I had to be the bigger person and take the second wheelchair away from them all and bring this to an end. I knew that this kid wasn’t going to make that sharp left turn in the middle of the crossroads section of the sidewalk. I let them off the property and came home.
All in all, this kid scraped his knee, fell on his back, his hands, and both knees, banged his head on the asphalt, and worst of all, nailed himself in the nuts. I could not live with myself if this kid would have gotten himself injured any more seriously than what he had already.
He couldn’t walk straight at all. And he probably was wishing he had the wheelchair to take home with him. But I think that it would have made him more afraid to move around in it, being that he couldn’t seem to control it. The kid called his mother on a cell phone to have her come pick him up. I made sure that they were off the property before I did anything else.
Now the winner of this was supposed to win $1.00, but all I got in reward was the middle finger.
Dambreaker 