Lorenzo Milam turned his back on self-pity in the way he turned his back on the South, on Warm Springs, his mother, and Yale.

Lorenzo Milam’s home sits at the edge of a deep canyon from where wild mustard floods up to his back yard. The mustard’s yellow edges up to willows, purple irises, to the red, pink, and creamy pale bougainvillea that cascade from the eaves of his wooden house. As in many older canyon neighborhoods, the opulent vegetation gives cover to mice, lizards, ants, roaches, slugs, snails, dozens of hungry, prolific lives. When they die, their flesh nourishes the leaves and vines that sheltered and fed them. Nature gives and takes with a blind efficiency that is brutal but coherent.

Milam calls San Diego, too, a cripple’s paradise.

From the vantage of his 60 years, Milam can almost discern his separate peace with Nature. His house is beset by it. The vines are closing in, reaching deeper, farther. His bones ache with arthritis. Nature, in fact, mauled and nearly killed him. Nature killed his sister. It also formed his talents and gave him the ambition to use them.

Milam learned to walk so well that TABs sometimes didn’t notice he was a cripple.

Lorenzo Milam, of course, is ambivalent about Nature. Lorenzo Milam is, in his words, a cripple.

He is a tall, blue-eyed man, at home in his WASPish chinos and blue, button-down Oxford-cloth shirt. Ensconced in his book-lined study/bedroom, the good stereo tuned to classical music, he at first seems far removed from the unsure Southern boy of 40 years ago, the boy “struck by the great crippler” while down from Yale. His ease is misleading. He wasn’t always at peace with his past.

“Being a crip sucks.”

His past — and present — a wheelchair, rests in the rear of a white van parked beside a shed in the back yard. The chair is the most obvious sign that his house is inhabited by what the language of cripples refers to as “a polio.”

His house, like his vocabulary, is adapted to his constellation of disabilities. The bed stands high off the floor, the toilet has a tall booster seat, the shower has a handrail. The modifications are so subtle, so discreet, a visitor would almost not notice that the home’s owner has difficulty standing up and walking.

The language that cripples — or as they call themselves, “crips” — use among themselves is not subtle, not discreet. It is quite precise. A writer for any one of the many “disability” magazines might end his piece with an autobiographical blurb that reads, “John Doe, C5-6, is an architect living in Portland, Oregon.”

The “C5-6” is adjectival, one of the crip language’s many extremely exact modifiers. John Doe suffered a break at his fifth and sixth cervical vertebrae. A spine-injured person reading the phrase would understand John Doe’s disability, would know John Doe is a quadriplegic, that he has use of his deltoids and biceps, but no control below his elbow flexors; would know he could use his wrists but has no hand muscle function; would also know that John Doc could probably cook for, feed, and groom himself, although he would need a personal-care attendant for other tasks.

Able bodied people, or the “temporarily able-bodied,” or “TABs," as crips refer to them, have a less dexterous vocabulary for describing degrees of mobility. TABs can say that someone is “sluggish” or “agile.” But TABs have no concise way of stating that a person’s forearms are strong, though his shoulders are weak, or that all the muscles below his sternum are flaccid.

Lorenzo Milam is doubly sensitive to language. As one of the forefathers of public radio, he opened more than 50 stations before he turned 40. He loves radio. He loved talking on radio. He chooses his words carefully. His voice is resonant.

A TAB, in order to have some feel for crip culture, must listen closely to Milam. To have some idea of all we’re dealing with here, it’s important to note how Milam describes how he learned to walk with leg braces and crutches. He learned to walk so well, to enter a room and find a seat so deftly and quickly, that TABs sometimes didn’t notice he was a cripple. He refers to this ability as “passing” — a key to Milam’s crip sensibility.

“Passing” is shaded with meanings, of which Milam, as a writer and as a Southerner raised and cared for by black domestics, is well aware.

“Passing” once referred to the ability of light-skinned blacks to pass as whites and circumvent Jim Crow laws. But passing has yet another meaning used commonly today. In black American parlance, to say that someone has passed is to say that someone has died.

Milam’s use of the term is not accidental, nor is it opportunistic. It reflects a realization that has been growing deep within the American crip heart for the past 20 years.

Disabled people, polios, palsies, paras, quads, C5-6s, the entire imperfect collective, have realized that their efforts to conform to TAB society have had tremendous emotional cost.

"When recovering from polio,” Milam remembers, “learning to walk again, I and other patients like me were taught to integrate — if I might use that word. I’m fully aware of what it means. I grew up where blacks had to use their own restrooms, could not eat in the same places we did, were strictly segregated. And my contact with blacks was strictly with the people who worked at my family’s house, in the kitchen, in the laundry room or whatever. And they were my favorite people. I just felt more comfortable with them in the kitchen than I did with my own family in the living room.

“My family’s from Jacksonville, Florida. Has always been from Jacksonville, for generations. And it’s a funny part of Florida because it’s where the hicks live. It’s a part of Georgia, really. We belong to Georgia.

“I was bom there in 1933, and I was raised Southern. Very Southern. I don’t have an accent because my family sent me off to school when I was 15. And I got rid of it right away because people would often make fun of me for it. But since mv family was fairly well off, they had sort of an upper-class country accent. My father was a lawyer. A very good one. He started companies. Foremost Dairies, for instance. He was in on the beginning of that, he was paid in stock, which did very well for him. He was the chief representative of Gibbs Shipbuilding Company, which was huge during the Second World War, really very important and very rich. My father did corporate law.

“I think I probably really left the South in ’48, when they shipped me off to school. Although I kept coming back there, my roots were no longer there. I went first to a place called Lawrenceville, which is for rich people in New Jersey. And then I went to Yale for a year. But then I got polio, and that put an end to that. Polio, at the end of my first year of college. I would have been 18 or 19. That was in 1952.”

Milam didn’t come to terms with what happened that late summer in 1952 until 30 years later. In 1984 Milam’s San Diego-based publishing house, Mho & Mho Works, printed Milam’s memoir of his disability. The Cripple Liberation Front Marching Band Blues was a crip-literature watershed. No one had ever seen anything quite like it.

“Much of The Cripple is unquotably obscene,” Walter Kendrick announced in a bewildered New York Times review. Kendrick was shocked. “It’s a maddening book that fits no category and allows no simple response.”

What happened in The Cripple, a book that could addle even Manhattan sophisticates, is that Milam returned to events he had not so much forgotten as set aside. Milam returned to his adventure with polio, the disease his sister contracted three weeks before he himself was diagnosed. His memoir begins with her protracted death.

• My sister. An innocent saint. For slightly less than four weeks, from 2 September 1952 to 29 December 1952, she will have ample time to work on her sainthood. She will have 2,832 hours to recall growing up in the sun of Florida, her shadow a black hole on the burning white sands of the beach.
• 169,920 minutes: she will have almost a hundred and seventy thousand minutes to remember running for a fast lob on the white-line tennis courts at the Timuquana Country Club. She will have over ten million seconds, there in her [iron lung], to remember that for twenty-nine years she had a constant companion, namely her body. A companion which asked little and gave much, and, of a sudden, in the early fall of that year, turned a dead weight like a tree which has had the life leeched out of it. So dead, so weighted, that she must ask the good nurse to scratch her forehead, move a leg, adjust her hair, or brush away the wetness that forms of its own accord at the corner of her blue-gray eyes, just below those beautiful ruddy lashes, that match her beautiful ruddy skin — turning quite pale now....
• And shortly before dawn, nineteen hundred and fifty-two years after the Birth of Our Lord and Savior, two days before the end of that dark year, at 4:47 in the morning, in some anonymous respiration center in North Carolina, where she has been sent for re-education of what is left of her body, in the company of some one hundred other machine-bound patients, just as the first of winter dawn is beginning to crack the still and snowy Chapel Hill sky, my sister will awaken for the last time to find her lungs clogged with the suppurating thickness of pneumonia....
• There is to be a battle, a short one....
• The iron maiden continues to pump dead lungs for over an hour before the night nurse discovers the drowned creature, gray froth on blue lips. My sister, who never did anyone any harm, who only wished joy for those around her, now lies ice and bone, the good spirit fled from her.

Milam’s battle lasted longer. Nearly half the book is filled with his detailed descriptions of the state-of-the-art care for polio victims in Jacksonville, Florida, in the early ’50s. “You must remember,” Milam cautions, “Jacksonville at that time was a very provincial place.”

• The Hospital they send me to in 1952, after the worst of the fire consumes my limbs, is called Hope Haven. Shades of Mercy! Where do they get these names?...
• Physical therapy is part of my daily routine at Hope Haven.
• There is a pool, a giant tub, really. There is a stretching table. And there is a shock machine.
• The shock machine is an apparatus designed some fifty years ago whose main purpose is to keep muscles from atrophy, from loss of “tone." Two pads, one positive, one negative, are applied to my body. The muscle to be pulsated lies between these two moist pads. The operator can increase or decrease the amount of current, of the rhythm of the shocks.
• It’s a medieval torture machine. And I find out later, much later, that the efficacy of physical shock therapy is so limited as to make it next to useless. Now we find out.
• The operator is Miss Bland, the physical therapist. She is shocking me powerfully twice a day, for four months. Anywhere from five minutes to half an hour. The cure and the disease match each other in relative pain. Miss Bland turns the dial all the way to nine, and a regular pulsating blast encompasses my upper leg, tearing at my bones and flesh, forkfuls of jerks blasting at my thighs. Dear God.

There are more shocks in The Cripple, and not all of them administered by Miss Bland. The book is itself a shock machine designed by Milam to jolt the notions anyone might have about disability. Milam circumvents his reader’s pity and sentimentality by describing what it means to live in an imperfect body. Milam discusses “all those embarrassing questions we, or rather you, have about cripples and sex. I know, I know the questions: namely, how does one make love in a basket?” He tells about the “secret Ritual of the Groaning Crap,” which happens after

• the normal muscle tone of the intestines, the easy workings of peristaltic action, that gentle kneading action that makes the bowels move, gets lost. The action motion of the outside of us (arms, legs) is gone; that inside (peristalsis) goes as well. The bolus which moves out so smartly for, say, [the able-bodied], from ileum to sphincter in 18 hours — is for us slowed down intolerably. It moves slower and slower, the lower intestines extract more and more water, it grows larger, and heavier, and drier. Get the picture? It becomes “impacted.”...
• Nothing makes it come ouL Nothing, not prayers, strain, sweating, rocking back and forth, arms folded across belly, crying out, gut-wrenching sweat and strain....
• For an hour, or two, or three, we lie there, thrashing back and forth, the edges of the pan of steel permanently etched in our bones; and we, straining with it, come, finally to the apex, the crowning moment....

These are things that Jerry’s Kids, or Jerry, would never, ever tell you. You might read about them only if you happened to subscribe to Mainstream (“Magazine of the Able-Disabled”) or New Mobility (formerly Spinal Network). These magazines’ ad spaces are purchased by corporations like Panasonic (“Personal hygiene is just that: personal. So naturally, you want to be as clean as you possibly can. Fortunately, now there’s a way. Introducing the Panasonic IntiMist Personal Hygiene System”), and SafeCare (“Discount Urological and Ostomy Supplies”), and Concepts in Confidence Co. (“Cut Your Bowel Maintenance Time with the Magic Bullet Suppository!”)

The editorial space of these magazines is occupied by articles on the horror of nursing homes (“[One resident was] seen with restraint ties wrapped around his neck”; “[A staff member left] rectal thermometers in two residents until the next shift arrived and found the thermometers still in place”), on health care reform, on new health care products, and on the occasional disabled performance artist (“Her hands — which she first describes as ‘curled, nubby, and soft as sweet marshmallows’ — are transformed by her words”).

To peruse this literature is to locate one source of Milam’s inspiration for The Cripple Liberation Front Marching Band Blues. Milam’s genius was to state eloquently what others said only privately. Milam polished, then presented to the public, the touchstone of “crip consciousness”: an overwhelming sense of rage.

For Milam, rage was slow in discovery. For years he didn’t think of himself as crippled. For someone of his generation, disability was not to be acknowledged. The risks were too great. (Limbs paralyzed by polio were sometimes amputated because some doctors felt the patients were better off without them.) Forty years ago, choices for cripples were few. If a cripple could not assimilate into the mainstream, he was locked into a life of dependence.

Milam escaped the role of eternal victim. Hope Haven was a cash cow for doctors who kept their patients lame. Milam's mother, after considerable struggle, had him transferred to the Warm Springs Foundation outside Atlanta — the polio rehabilitation facility established by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, into which FDR invested one third of his considerable personal fortune.

Although today Milam could pass, so to speak, for a man in his 40s, when he mentions Warm Springs, it's as though 40 years lift from his shoulders. He sits straighter, he grins, his feet wiggle, he is restless in his chair.

“I was there for nine months. Roosevelt was the polio, the master who had fought polio and won. He was, he was a god, and he created Warm Springs. He was wonderful. I mean, we adored him for having set up Warm Springs, which was one of the great rehabilitation facilities in the world. It was a wonderful place, with great food and a wonderful campus and the best medical and physical therapy help in the world. Roosevelt was our God.

“We didn’t have any war-injured there. No. Absolutely not. They’d be at veterans’ hospitals. We looked down on them. I swear we did, because they didn’t have what we had. They didn’t have the Warm Springs Foundation with its fantastic rehabilitation facilities. The other thing was that for somebody who’s spinal-injured, like a war injury, within a month of rehab they achieve pretty much the maximum of what they’re going to have to work with. For polio it’s slowly upwards, and there were all these miracles to read about.

“I had a guy that came to see me when I was in Warm Springs, and he told me about how he had polio and he was going waterskiing later on that day. So we were filled with miracle stories. And we had this great facility in which these miracle stories could be manifested, and we had the great guru, FDR, who had gone through all this and ended up being president of the United States.

“Remember, Warm Springs was the first completely accessible campus in the world. When we would go out to eat at some of the neighboring restaurants, we had a physical therapist or what they called the push boys — the guys that pushed the wheelchairs around — they would carry us into the restaurant. That was the way you got over steps and over curbs, somebody carried you.

“Warm Springs was a very hermetic situation. We knew we were in the best place in the world, and we were proud and we were happy. We were a very happy bunch of kids. All of us were about the same age. At least the circle I hung out with. We knew we were the hot ones in that wonderful place. We had a great time. We used to go out and neck in the back bushes, and we didn’t drink a lot, but we had our friends smuggle in moonshine. And we’d get just shit-faced on moonshine and fall out of our wheelchairs.

“And once again I was in the South. All the people that took care of us on the lower level, taking care of us for our bathroom facilities and everything, were black. And some of my best pals were at that time, once again, black. The people in the upper echelons, the doctors and nurses and physical therapists, were all white. It was a great place. I can’t speak highly enough of how much Warm Springs meant to me and my friends. Although no one else still uses them — they’re a very eccentric design — I still use the same model of crutches that they made for me at Warm Springs.

“Finally, it came time to leave. Somebody said to me, ’You’re gonna be leaving next week.’ So I got all my stuff together. I came to Warm Springs on a stretcher. And I left in a wheelchair and crutches. I had started to begin to walk. I look back on it and I know I was very apprehensive. I not only was apprehensive, I was, at 18, 19, just beginning to go out in the world, and all of a sudden I was going back home again. To a family that I was not very close to.

“All my brothers and sisters were off at school, and I was there alone with my mother in this big, cold house. I was very unhappy. When I was 18 I had just really shaken her off and the world that I had grown up in, and I was gonna be my own man. And I was right back in her care, in a dependent position on her, and what it did was turn me immensely bitter.

“But I had my own car. That was my freedom, to get out of the house. And, poor woman, she didn’t know, she didn’t know what was going on. No one trains parents to be parents of crips. It’s like having a baby. You know, I remember when my daughter was born. All of a sudden we had this person in the house that we didn’t know, didn’t know anything about. A stranger had moved in with us. And we had to change ourselves accordingly. When I came back from Warm Springs, I was a stranger to my mother, and she had absolutely no training about how to deal with this kind of stranger, especially this 19-year-old pissed-off kid who didn’t want anything except to be left alone.

“I wanted so badly to ‘pass.’ I did everything I could that would make it seem like I was ‘normal.’ 1 was gonna get back in and become part of the mainstream, and I was gonna be what they call in the crip movement a ‘Crip Cool.’ ‘Crip Cool’ means that one goes through one’s life not even acknowledging this thing, this other presence in the room — a pair of crutches, a pair of braces. You don’t acknowledge that, you don’t speak of that.

“So you mainstreamed. You just did it. It was just like if you grew up a black in the South, you did not drink out of a white water fountain. You didn’t even think about it, you just stayed with the drinking fountain that said ‘Negro.’ That was the way the world worked back then, and when I got out of Warm Springs I knew I was gonna mainstream. I was gonna be part of the world.

“The main task was to be unnoticed. When I got up in the morning I practiced this. When I got into the standing position, I was really good at it, I did it so quickly that you didn’t even notice anything. I mean, people would always underestimate the extent of my disability.”

And so Milam the Cripple went unnoticed while the other Milam proceeded into the world. But the world into which he proceeded was very different from the one in which he now lives. A fair measure of this difference is that when Milam enrolled in and arrived at Haverford, a Quaker college in Pennsylvania (“I wanted to get out of the South, and I didn’t want to go back to Yale”), the school’s administration made no allowance for his disability. He was expected to amble about on crutches, climb 19 steps to the dining hall, as if nothing were wrong with his legs.

These expectations were not in themselves exceptional — cripples, at that time, were either hidden away or, if they made their way into public, were supposed to blend in with the able-bodied. However, these Quakers — and according to Milam, Haverford was a very Quaker school — never gave their expectations a second thought. These radical pacifists who might today be construed as “progressives,” so attuned to human suffering and the presence of God, never wondered why Hugh Gallagher, Milam’s wheelchair-riding friend from Warm Springs, left Haverford for a school in California. (Gallagher left because Haverford was impossible for him to navigate in his wheelchair.)

The Quakers never suggested, for example, that Milam enter the dining hall by way of the four steps that led to its kitchen. But Milam never thought of it either. “If anyone had told me to use the steps to the kitchen to get into the dining hall, I would have told him he was crazy.”

Milam soldiered on with his crutches and orthopedic corset, but he didn’t get far. The dutiful, acquiescent youth at Haverford, daily laboring up those 19 steps to eat, had eventually to become the angry middle-aged man who wrote The Cripple Liberation Front Marching Band Blues. This transition would require, of course, a crisis, perhaps two, something that would break him, once again, so he could, once again, recreate himself.

The first crisis, or really the beginning of a very long first crisis, happened in 1959. It was the kind of ironic scenario on which writers and philosophers thrive. Milam’s initial existential crack-up occurred when he was, quite literally, set free. After finishing his education, he inherited a pile of money — an amount that today would be worth well over a million dollars. Milam took it and ran to Spain.

A portrait of him from that period hangs in his San Diego house. It is a very Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man portrait: black-and-white, slightly blurred, taken by an itinerant photographer in Malaga. Milam, bushy haired, wearing a dark sweater and round horn-rim glasses, looks like a young James Joyce, seated on a wrought-iron bench, flanked by two children. The photo has an oddly Third World feel. The image is faint, washed out, and seems like a memory from pre-World War II Europe.

The photograph was taken just before a battle, albeit one fought in Milam’s mind. The Cripple's narrative meanders until Milam arrives in Spain. There it stops and acquires a terrible seriousness of purpose.

When Milam arrives on the Costa del Sol, he rents a small seaside house. In the fly-blown village where he stays, his story becomes less about crippled him and more about a man confronted with a tremendous dilemma. Without giving the plot away, it is enough to know that this story’s drama is generated by a single moral disability. Milam’s all-too-human flaw or hamartia, as the Greeks called it, was self-pity.

“Don’t be angry with me. Or sick,” he warns his readers early on. “You see: I have vowed that I will tell you everything. Everything. I am going to cut a hunk of a mile wide channeling through my soul and lay it out on the page for you. The depths of my soul. The reaches of my workings....”

It’s hard to think of another secular confessional so intently guided by self-betrayal. The Cripple’s Spanish section belqngs to an older tradition, for example, St. Augustine’s Confessions. An agnostic, however, can be more unforgiving than God. Milam had no one to pardon him for his flaw. His self-pity was his constant companion, his convenient, all-purpose excuse for manipulating and using other people, for, in short, doing wrong.

If it seems strange Milam’s book details the bowel habits of bed-ridden cripples and later adopts a high moral tone, it’s important to remember that the ambition of The Cripple is to say things that hadn’t been said before about disability. Milam wanted to destroy any sentimentality his reader may have felt for the disabled. The Cripple’s pages on Spain show how self-pity turns victims into victimizers.

Self-pity is not much discussed in public policy debates over entitlement and equality before the law. This is probably because the public prefers to think that groups on which it bestows its good intentions are somehow noble and therefore deserving. Disenfranchised groups like cripples have a vested interest in disguising their contempt for this condescension. Milam wasn’t interested in disguising anything. Perhaps because he was wealthy, born into an aristocratic Southern family, for whatever reason, he maintained a margin of independence that allowed him to tell the truth about what it meant to go through life strapped in a corset bumping along on crutches. And the truth told by the crutches and corset absolves neither the cripple nor able-bodied society.

What Milam struggles to say in The Cripple is that no one is endlessly deserving.

After Spain, Milam turned his back on self-pity in the way he turned his back on the South, on Warm Springs, his mother, and Yale. Milam parlayed his inheritance into a grand career; he became a tycoon. Milam doesn’t like to talk about it much now, but among people who know something about the history of American radio, Milam is a legend. He has written two books on the subject, one of which, Sex and Broadcasting, achieved bible-status for radio entrepreneurs.

Of the time between his departure from Spain and his arrival in San Diego, Milam says he was inspired by Great Society idealism. “We were determined,” he says, “to make sure that every town and city in this country had its own public radio station.”

He lived in Seattle, Dallas, the Bay Area, Mexico. He bought and sold dozens of stations. He was hard driven. He was successful. He was, he says, “a real jerk.”

He estimates that over those 20 years, he made close to $5 million but slowly gave it away. And during all this aggressive busyness, Milam was also at work on his mind. Like many other people of that era, Milam migrated from one school of therapy to another. He tried straight analysis; he tried est twice; he embraced Fritz Perl’s Gestalt therapy and became skilled at the “hot seat” technique, about which he writes, “I could reduce people in our group sessions to tears in a second. I could really make people cry. I was good at it I had a very sharp, sarcastic wit, which was, of course, a form of self-protection — something that crips are very good at.” Someone so hell-bent on success, someone who alternated between the therapist’s couch and group sessions in which people brow-beat each other into insensibility, was bound, sooner or later, to implode.

We will probably never have an accurate body count of those who didn’t survive the great psychotherapeutic frenzy of the late 1960s and ’70s. Certainly many people became so adept at tearing apart their personalities, their dreams, their minds that they met a Humpty Dumpty-style end. But Milam, maybe due to crip tenacity, survived. Or at least part of him did.

In 1977 Milam experienced what he describes as a kind of nervous breakdown. “I now realize that I was clinically depressed,” he says, which is another way of saying that he came to San Diego as a last resort.

“It was horrible. I was depressed, and I was depressed at the fact that I was depressed. It all fed on itself, spiraling and spiraling downward “I had just built radio station number 15, and it went under. In Dallas. And the whole thing blew up, it just didn’t work. It went under. And it took me with it. You know, I was the guru of community radio in the States, and my 15th station went under. What happened, I think, as in a lot of cases, especially when you reach 40, when one thing goes under, everything else goes under. My whole life just took a tailspin.

“I couldn’t figure what was going on. It was a lot like being on peyote. I thought, ‘My God, everything they’ve said about peyote is right. This is all a flashback, goddammit, and I’m never gonna get out of it.’ I was convinced that’s what it was. But it was terrible, it was like the worst of the peyote trips, when I had gone into a depression. And when one is depressed on drugs, the depression feeds on itself. And it becomes depressing to be depressed. And then that becomes depressing, so there I am, going into this...tailspin.

“So I came to San Diego to try to recover. A very good friend of mine lives here and virtually took care of me for six months. And I remember just sitting on beautiful hot days like this, and I’d just stare at the wall all day long. For days and days, until I found a shrink, my 12th shrink, and I started going to her.

“One day I read an article in the Union-Tribune about a La Jolla counselor who was a specialist in burn-out. ‘That’s what I am,’ I thought, ‘I’m burned out. Maybe she can help me.’ ”

In Milam’s most recent book, Crip Zen: A Manual for Survival, published this year by Mho & Mho Works, he describes his first encounter with the “burn-out specialist”: I drove up to her house on the hill there in the south-eastern part of La Jolla. The front yard consisted of an arty black wrought-iron fence and dirty, peeling Astro-turf. She had poodles. Not the big ones: no — those little white ones with pink asses and ribbons in their hair and yappy barks. “Just like my mother,” I thought. My mother, as long as I can remember, has always had poodles. They fight with each other, get underfoot. One of them is 17 years old, with bad breath and phlebitis. The others are card-carrying hebephrenics.

Those dogs — that was the first thing I ran into when I came to Rachael’s office. The second one was me. Rachael kept asking me why I was there, and I told some of these funny stories about me and my burn-out, and while I was talking, this tear came out of her left eye, ran down her cheek...I was looking for a solution to my bum-out and I ran into this 35-year-old shrink who has freckles and poodles and still knows how to cry.

Milam met with Rachael twice a week for six months. (“Rachael was a genius. She really knew what was going on with me.”) It took him, he says, some 50 hours of therapy before he was able to confront the source of his depression. Milam is reluctant to say what exactly happened during the session in which he made his healing breakthrough.

“It was an epiphany,” he says. “And those sorts of things are very precious. You don’t feel like sharing them with the public.”

The Cripple was his epiphany’s product. It was the book Rachael told him he had to write. All of it, the guilt and rage, the cripple’s awful secrets, were what Milam had kept inside him and were what nearly drove him crazy.

The distance between The Cripple and Crip Zen is in its way a compressed psychological history of the disability rights movement. Milam is the solitary Everycripple who makes his way from rage and self-pity to appreciation of what it means to be a member of a class protected by federal law.

This isn’t to say that Milam has decided to put a good face on things and content himself with passage of the Americans with Disabilities Act. “Being a crip sucks,” he says.

Nonetheless, since publication of The Cripple, Milam has become an increasingly politicized cripple. When he writes now, it’s most often for disability magazines or for the Los Angeles Times or Washington Post op-ed pages.

Crip Zen is a collection of these writings. As always, Milam is concerned with saying things other writers won’t. He discusses disabled sexuality, masturbation, celibacy, pros and cons of paying for sex if you can’t or won’t find sex elsewhere. He speaks about the depression the disabled feel. He also probes the ambiguities of legal entitlement, the complicated consequences of groups militating for rights.

Milam believes that disadvantaged groups like cripples deserve every right that allows them to become self-sufficient, to break free from humiliating dependence on others and the state. They deserve, he implies, to become ultimately undeserving. But, he says, this sense of entitlement has crept into society at large; everyone, in one way or another, has come to feel deserving of special treatment. He illustrates this point with an encounter he had at a San Diego supermarket.

“I drove into the Safeway parking lot, and there it was, a ratty old Valiant — no disabled plates, nothing — parked in ‘my’ place. As I was getting out of my car, a guy in a sporty houndstooth jacket dashed out of the store, got in the Valiant.

“ ‘Hey,’ I yelled at him. ‘That’s a disabled parking spot. Can’t you read the sign?’

“ ‘Don’t get on my case, buddy.’ His face wasn’t any too friendly.

“ ‘Yeah, but I need that space.’

“ ‘You’re not the only one who needs that space, you know, buddy.’

“ ‘Oh?’ He didn’t look very disabled.

“ ‘Yeah — I deserve it too. I’m a manic-depressive, so don’t get on my case, buddy.’ With that, he pops in his car and he’s gone.

“Well, he had me there.

“Today,” says Milam, “so much of our society runs on feelings of self-pity and entitlement.”

When Milam isn’t writing about the politics of disability, he travels, most frequently to Mexico, to Oaxaca, where he keeps a house. His 1992 travel book about the place, The Blob that Ate Oaxaca, was nominated for the 1992 Pulitzer Prize.

Milam loves Mexico, he says, because people there are more comfortable with imperfection. “There are crips galore in Oaxaca. It’s kind of a crip paradise. So many people have something wrong with them that people are very accepting of someone with a disability. They talk about So-and-So down the street, you know, the harelip, or they talk about Mr. So-and-So, the guy with the club foot. They don’t seem to be as ashamed about these things.”

He calls San Diego, too, a cripple’s paradise. Snow and ice are nasty obstacles to someone who moves through life in a wheelchair and on crutches. Car culture, something many able-bodied Southern Californians despise, is a blessing to cripples who can drive. With everything “freeway close” and equipped with convenient “drive-thru” access, Milam in his specially equipped van can get around without much trouble.

One of the surprising benefits, he contends, of living in a spot that places a premium on physical perfection, is the great care Southern Californians lavish on their bodies. Cripples may not attract many whistles at the beach, but they can treat their aching muscles to bubbling Jacuzzis and many kinds of soothing massage. Milam takes advantage of this, too. His home has a redwood deck with a hot tub, bordered by flowering perennials; his bathroom is equipped with a sauna/steam room.

But what Southern California has offered him goes beyond redwood decks and sun and steamy, bubbly tubs of water. Milam, like other immigrants to this place, came in order to create a new life, to gain perspective on and achieve some peace with the old one. Like other Southern California immigrants, Milam’s separate peace has involved a casual “conversion” to Eastern religion.

Crip Zen, as its tide implies, deals in part with the understanding Milam has come to with the material world or, as Buddhists would call it, the world of illusion. Cripples, he says, are in an especially good position for apprehending Zen’s insistence on the insignificance of the physical.

“Crip Zen,” Milam writes, “begins on the day you wake up and know that you no longer own your body.”

Although this is a realization cripples might come to early on their own, it is something most of us will understand with old age. Milam might say, probably disingenuously, that he now writes about disability for the disabled; but he’s really writing with all of us in mind.