Contempt Across a Two-Way Street

The woman directly behind me, and the man behind her, and the couple behind him, were all sighing audibly and theatrically. I knew why, too. I was holding them up. They were important, see, and they had important places to go, and they weren't getting to these important places nearly fast enough because I was there in front of them.

I could feel the slow burn in my belly and my brain as I continued trudging along, head down, knowing that if that fucking cow behind me sighed one more time I would end up doing something I might well regret. Or might not.

Instead, I brought the cane in close to my body, took a full step to the left, and found myself standing shin-deep in the dirty snow. I kept my head down, my knuckles whitening around the handle of the cane, and let them all pass, as I fought off the urge to start swinging wildly.

After they passed, and after I was sure no one else was coming, I stepped out into the narrow path carved through the five-day-old snow, and continued tapping my way home.

The same scene would replay itself three more times on the five-block walk from the subway that night. Each time it happened, I could feel a new emotion solidifying itself.

I've tried, as much as possible, to take the whole "losing my sight" thing with a grain of salt. I just go about my business as normally as I can, and accept help when I need it. There's no use in going into all that again. But now, for the first time, I could feel a solid, burning contempt for the sighted making its first appearance.

I don't want to be that way. I know too many bitter blind folks, angry at the world because they've been cheated out of their sight. I may be angry at the world, but that's not the reason why. In fact, I've almost come to embrace it. These last few days, though, the sighteds have been real dicks. Maybe that's the thing?I hate them for being dicks much more than I hate them for having sight?but when I'm doing my damnedest to get to my apartment along a convoluted, 18-inch-wide path (canes don't work in the snow), and when every corner is a potential disaster, and I end up with a line of people behind me, sighing because I'm moving too slowly and they don't want to mess their fancy-ass boots by actually using them to walk in the snow to get around me, well, the first thing that comes to mind is, At least you fuckers can see.

That's no good at all.

It's especially no good when I realize that it goes both ways.

In order to get to work in the morning?when even though I should, I tend not to use my cane?I need to pass the Associated Blind building. And so every morning, simply as an accident of timing, I pass through a veritable parade of the blind. Shortly before 8, they all spill out of the front door, with their dogs and their own canes, veer to the left and head straight for me. It's a sight that always fills me with terror, especially since there are two or three among them who, swear to God, seem to aim for me, swinging their canes in a much wider arc than necessary.

When there's snow on 23rd St., and when only a narrow path has been cleared, and I find myself on a collision course with some chubby blind chick, my initial, reflexive thought is inevitably, "Oh, Christ?here we go again."

Because of that, I can't honestly claim that if the roles were reversed on that darkened Brooklyn sidewalk, and I was the one who was stuck behind the slow-tapping blindo, I wouldn't be sighing theatrically, too. Believe you me, I can sigh with the best of them.

It's sad, I guess, that I feel no more empathy for the blind than I do for people with all their faculties intact. Maybe it comes from?at present at least?being balanced precariously between the two camps?not completely blind yet, and so not an official member of the club, yet far from in possession of the glorious 20/20. Being outside of both groups?at least the way I figure it?allows me to hold both of them in contempt.

It's funny, in an unfunny way. When I was a young man and had the fire around me, I held most of humanity in contempt?like most such young men who read all the same books at around the same age do?because I thought I was smarter than they were, that I was more in touch with what was really going on.

Maaann.

That I was wrong to think such a thing about myself has been proven to me, time and time again.

And now that I sit here and think about it a bit, this new contempt, which I thought initially had to do with the unthinking rudeness of so many, I now realize has more to do with a general sense of self-loathing.

The heavy sighs of those fuckers behind me that night (and the next, and the next as well) simply pointed out my own failings?that I can't do these things anymore. Can't walk fast enough, for fear I'll end up in the middle of the road, or get lost. That's a pretty shitty feeling.

On the flip side, my contempt for the blindos is twofold. First, their seemingly random movements down the sidewalk present me with a real challenge every morning. Most people move in straight lines, so I can position them in my narrow field of vision and not have to worry about them again. But the blindos, moving this way and that, force me to take evasive action?and when you have no depth or peripheral vision, evasive action entails dangers all its own. If there's someone to my right or left, I'll slam into them. I never know what I'll end up in, or against. Or beneath.

And seeing them spill out of the Associated Blind building shows me all too clearly where I'm headed. It doesn't look good. They move like helpless beasts through the world. And worse still, I can see how the people around them?the sighteds and dim-sighteds like myself?react: the expressions of disgust and horror that cross the faces of the other pedestrians as they pass.

(Of course, I get that already, so it shouldn't bother me.)

So maybe that's it?this new contempt is not a contempt at all, but rather a fear of what's to come. A fear that the loss of winter light reminds me about with a force I'd rather not deal with.

Then again, maybe these people really are assholes, really are creepy, and I'm absolutely justified in thinking the way I do.

Whew?thank God I didn't have to pay a shrink for that!