"Please, no doom and gloom," Christopher Reardon asks. "This isn't another kid in a wheelchair crying about his life."
This is a kid in a wheelchair who says he's trying to tell the truth about his life. A kid, a man, really, who just turned 22 and wants his writings to challenge the way people think about cancer survivors, wheelchair drivers and maybe even the world.
Since the age of 13, Reardon has relied on his one good hand to type out stories and poems to make sense of his life. He recently spent $2,500 in savings to self-publish his first book, a collection of poems, essays and photographs titled "Inside the Pinball Machine."
The 153-page book is filled with rage, humor and hope, as he provides an authentic account of his life and questions the motives of others, everyone from President Bush to Disney's Little Mermaid.
So far, he's sold 33 copies. Five friends helped him with marketing, splitting up to hang fliers in stores, malls and on telephone poles around Beverly and Danvers.
One could say Reardon started collecting his material in second grade, while a student at St. John's School in Beverly. He began to experience uncontrollable fits of shaking in his left arm. One day, it happened in front of his father. Reardon says he was embarrassed by it all. His father was scared and took him to the hospital.
Doctors discovered a tumor, the size of a pinkie nail, on his brain stem and scheduled surgery. Probably the worst pain came when a doctor ruled football too dangerous for his fragile head. He was a boy who loved sports more than anything else.
An MRI the spring of fourth grade revealed the tumor was "active again," and proton radiation followed. It killed the cancerous tumor, but swelling affected his speech, his vision and eventually left him in a wheelchair.
In seventh grade, his teacher asked the students to write a poem about their lives. He didn't realize how much he had to say.
"It felt good," Reardon says. "I liked it."
At Pingree School in Hamilton, and now Stonehill College, he continued writing and reading, drawn to favorite poets like Sylvia Plath and Dylan Thomas. His writing helps when others disappoint him.
In high school, he says he struggled to fit in socially, counting on one hand how many times he got invited to parties. His experiences inspired the poem "Tired."
"Tired of watching reruns of "That 70s Show," running
When I'm still up at like 3 in the morning
It's a good show and it makes me laugh
But I just saw the same episode at 12 and half past"
People make assumptions all the time about people in wheelchairs. Reardon says they think they have to be nice to him, or figure he's automatically kind because he's disabled.
With a mischievous grin, Reardon shares his idea for a comedy screenplay he wants to write where the main character smuggles drugs in his wheelchair, and no one suspects a thing. Sort of a "Blazing Saddles" for the disabled.
"I want to make a complete mockery of all of it," he says.
His closest friends make fun of him, watch games with him and "kind of ignore me when I talk about poetry." They carry the wheelchair upstairs to parties and make sure they don't drink too much so they can get him back down.
In one poem, "The 3 Births of My Brother," he writes a touching tribute to his best friend, Jay Norton, recalling how much it meant that he skipped practice to visit him during a hospital stay in Boston. He could swear and act like himself again. " ... How you made things all right and pulled me out of despair."
This summer he's working on his first piece of fiction. He's 40 pages in. After struggling to make sense of his life for so long, he's now at a place where he realizes he wouldn't want to be anyone else.
"Not many people get to experience what I get to experience, " Reardon says, "good or bad."
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"Inside the Pinball Machine" is available at www.atlasbooks.com
Staff writer Susan Flynn can be reached at 978-338-2658 or by e-mail at sflynn@salemnews.com.
