Moving Violations
by
John Hockenberry
(Hyperion)
review by Judith Van Buren
Moving Violations
by
John Hockenberry
(Hyperion)
review by Judith Van Buren
Wheelchairs had a magical flying-carpet appeal to me when I was a child. They were chairs that moved but had little to do with people who couldn't. I thought they were wonderful, clever modes of transportation and I wanted one. Later I learned that only sad people could have them. Then I was taught the tone of pity to use when a wheelchair-with-person appeared in my line of vision. I learned not to stare. Finally, I learned not to see the person in the chair; the cripple, or, in John Hockenberry's wonderful exhilarating book Moving Violations: War Zones, Wheelchairs, and Declarations of Independence, "the crip."John Hockenberry is an Emmy award-winning correspondent for ABC's news show Day One. He was with NPR (National Public Radio) for ten years as a reporter, a Middle East correspondent, and a program host. Hockenberry is harpsichordist, a paraplegic and a wonderful storyteller.
When he was nineteen years-old, a college freshman at the University of Chicago, hitching back with his best friend from a trip east, he was in an automobile accident. It left him with an irreversible spinal cord injury at chest level. As the writer says, "there is nothing visible about my border of feeling and numbness. It is all the same skin and the same bones....it is a border that snakes around my torso. In the summer the border is easier to notice. Only my upper body sweats."
Moving Violations is an apt title because Hockenberry exposes ruthlessly how frightened the world is of people who are, for whatever reason, different, and how we would much prefer them not to exist. He goes anywhere he wants and thus violates our perceptions of how nice cripples should behave and he is scathing about anyone who tries to get in his way; Jerry Lewis for example. "Jerry's kids are people in wheelchairs on television raising money to find a way to prevent their ever having been born. When crips watch the telethon, the words 'bravery' and 'courage' and 'heroism' do not come to mind." He exposes the sanctimony of well-meaning friends who pitied his parents because their son survived. He reaches into his own family closet and releases an uncle who was institutionalized and never mentioned because of family shame of mental retardation.
Unabashedely, the author answers questions only Oprah is shameless enough to ask -- about sex -- about hygiene. He describes situations both as a reporter and as a lover that are moving and very, very funny; as is his description of having to hide under his ex-girlfriend's bed while she was making love/screwing/having sex with a new beau.
"I didn't like this guy much, but as time went on I found myself rooting for Martha as I lay under the bed. I was the coach and she was the home team. The bed began to really move above my nose now. He increased his speed and enthusiasm by making noises of his own. Grunts and 'Yeah, baby's' and a lot of 'Oh, Yes's' I wanted to tell him to shut up so I could hear how Martha was doing. Her voice was beginning to sound like a child being driven across railroad tracks at 70 miles an hour in a jeep."
Afterwards...
"'That was more fun than a barrel of monkeys.' After he's just
finished making love to the woman of my dreams, he says more fun than a barrel of
monkeys? Even Martha sounded puzzled. In her laughter I could almost hear her
wondering if there was anything good on TV. 'Did you come?' he asks. Martha
pauses, 'Yeah, couldn't you tell?' No way, I thought. That much I knew. Martha
wasn't going to marry this guy either."
Moving
Violations will make you laugh out loud when Hokenberry recalls being at the Ayatollah's
funeral in Iran where his guide was a humanitarian who shouted "Death to All
Americans." It will make you laugh raucously as he relates his embarrassment when his mother insisted in a restaurant that
there be menu's in braille -- on principle. You will laugh again with delight and nod in affirmation when he says that we all have to
learn, sooner or later, that self-pity is no way to play cards. The book will make you cry and it will make you angry. It will also
make you want to have John Hockenberry as your friend to talk to and to show him
places you think he would enjoy rolling along to.
