Leg, p.1
Leg, page 1
PRAISE FOR LEG
“A strange, smutty, hilarious, beautiful, compassionate, provoking, big-hearted, sharp-tongued, original, brilliant memoir. It’s about a very particular coming-of-age that will nevertheless remind readers of what it is to be young and to want everything. I hated to see it end.” —ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN, NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST AND AUTHOR OF THE HERO OF THIS BOOK
“Leg is a laugh-out-loud funny memoir that will hit you squarely in the heart and leave you with tears in your eyes. Tears of joy and tears of heartache, sure—but most of all tears of gratitude for this incredible tale of marvelous resilience, tremendous love, a larger-than-life family, and boner pills. Greg Marshall is one helluva storyteller, taking hilarity and emotional resonance and putting them in a paint mixer set to high until he creates an astonishingly bright, bold, and beautiful new color that is uniquely his own.” —ISAAC FITZGERALD, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF DIRTBAG, MASSACHUSETTS
“Leg has all the ingredients of an addictive memoir. But what separates this book from the pack is Marshall’s rich and rare perspective navigating the world as a queer disabled person. Marshall is one of the most exciting new voices in nonfiction. I could get lost in his brilliant brain forever.” —RYAN O’CONNELL, AUTHOR OF JUST BY LOOKING AT HIM
“In the struggles of his body, his family, and his own exploration of his identities, Marshall finds a mirror and a prism for life in America now. This is a funny, smart, and loving memoir, and I learned perhaps more about myself reading Leg than I did about Marshall.” —ALEXANDER CHEE, AUTHOR OF HOW TO WRITE AN AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL NOVEL
“Greg Marshall’s Leg is a generous gift to readers. Yes, it is a raw, brutally honest, and compassionate chronicle of discovery (both of the self and of the surrounding world), but it is also one of the funniest books I’ve ever read.” —CHLOÉ COOPER JONES, AUTHOR OF EASY BEAUTY
“Leg is the rare witty, tender, ebullient, wry, and raunchy memoir. Marshall is a natural storyteller, both disarmingly vulnerable and wickedly funny, and Leg is a beautiful, necessary book.” —LAUREN HOUGH, NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF LEAVING ISN’T THE HARDEST THING
“No one manages to make the specific as universal as Greg Marshall. Sharply observed, Leg captures a life of victories and struggles that never once tips into victimhood while showcasing a spirit like no other.” —BEN PHILIPPE, AUTHOR OF SURE, I’LL BE YOUR BLACK FRIEND
Copyright © 2023 Greg Marshall
Cover © 2023 Abrams
Published in 2023 by Abrams Press, an imprint of ABRAMS. All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2022950073
ISBN: 978–1-4197–6360–1
eISBN: 978–1-64700–763–8
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To Dad, who said I could do it.
To Mom, who drove me to it.
Eleven doctors said he’d never walk. A few predicted a life of incontinence and wheelchairs. Physical therapists and pediatricians recommended a “special” school for the little baby born too early.
Medical professionals tried to comfort me with words like, “We’re sure his IQ is normal,” and “If he’s ever able to express himself he may, one day, be able to be integrated in public schools.”
They made diagnoses like polio, cerebral palsy, retardation, and in my usual headstrong way of dealing with life, I threw their words into the trash. I refused to listen. I don’t believe in labels.
—DEBI MARSHALL, “SILVER LININGS,” MARYSVILLE GLOBE, JUNE 25, 1997
CONTENTS
Author’s Notes
I Am Spasticus!
Next Week: Debi Fights for Her Life
Marshall Family Vibrator
If I Only Had a Leg
Never Get AIDS
Suck Ray Blue
The John
Melk
Seksi
Our Left Foot
Heal Thy Angels
An Unusual Event for Your Social Calendar
Après Bob
More Ham
Corey
Our Camelot, with Chickens
Acknowledgments
About the Author
The Marshall family, 1993.
The author (top row, second from right) pretends he is an only child.
AUTHOR’S NOTES
Leg is a true story. Some names and details have been changed and some characters rendered in the composite. Dialogue has been recreated from memory. Though faithfully portrayed to the best of my abilities, my leg may have its own version of events.
Some of the chapters in this book originally appeared, in different forms or with different titles, in the following publications: “Next Week: Debi Fights for Her Life” in Tahoma Literary Review, “Marshall Family Vibrator” in Nude Bruce Review, “If I Only Had a Leg” in Electric Literature, “Never Get AIDS” in Barely South Review, “Suck Ray Blue” in Tampa Review, “The John” in Fourth Genre, “Melk” in Off Assignment, “Seksi” in Foglifter, “Heal Thy Angels” in Green Mountains Review, “An Unusual Event for Your Social Calendar” in Narratively, “More Ham” in Joyland, “Corey” in Southwest Review, and “Our Camelot, with Chickens” in Transformations.
Material was also adapted from “Revirgination,” which appeared in Hobart and “Our Longest Point,” which appeared in Plenitude.
My mom’s extraordinary column, “Silver Linings,” was instrumental in the creation of Leg. The column ran from 1997 to 2002 in many of the eight community newspapers and business journals my dad co-owned as part of his small publishing empire, Sun News. Those papers included the Marysville Globe, the Arlington Times, and the Preston Citizen.
I AM SPASTICUS!
Philip Roth once wrote that there aren’t many words less abstruse than “leg,” but it’s taken me a lifetime to understand mine. I wish I could say my leg fought in a war, or had a drug problem, or escaped a polygamist cult, or smoked cigarettes with Gertrude Stein in Paris in the twenties, perhaps while wearing a beret and writing poetry. That leg would be worthy of a memoir!
“You can’t call your book Leg,” my mom told me when I brought up the idea. We were walking under the stars in Costa Rica, on the same beach where my big sister, Tiffany, would be married the next afternoon. The sand under my feet felt therapeutic in a vaguely menacing way, like walking on ball bearings and lug nuts. I have very sensitive feet.
“Who would want to read a book called Leg?” Mom asked.
“I would,” said my mom’s partner, Alice. “I think it sounds intriguing.” She was drawing what looked like vaginas in the surf with her big toe, calmly avoiding scuttling crabs that left my little sister Mona and me squealing. Alice made jazz hands at the crabs. “Leg!”
“Don’t agree with him, Alice. That’s not your job.”
Keeping Mom alive, that was Alice’s job. Getting Mom, a sixty-year-old cancer patient, to this exclusive peninsular hideaway, that was Alice’s job.
The journey from Utah had required, among other things, flying over a Neverland of sparkling ocean in a tiny propeller plane and then cramming into an off-roading Jeep. We all knew that Alice, my mom’s doctor-turned-lover-turned-perpetual-fiancée, was the only person on the planet with the skill and will to do it, the only person who could Weekend at Bernie’s Mom down the aisle on Tiff’s big day, if it came to that. Plus, Alice would know what to do with my mom’s body if she died in Central America. If it were up to us, we would just take her out in a snorkeling boat and roll her into the ocean. We might even do that before she died.
Having a mom who’s been battling cancer since I was in the second grade has turned me into a morbid bastard, and my four siblings are no better. When your mom is always dying, you think she never will.
“I could call it The Kid with the Limp,” I said.
“Jesus!” Mom said. “That’s even worse.”
We walked for a while in silence, listening to waves crash against the shore while taking in the distant flicker of tiki torches at Tiffany’s rehearsal dinner farther up the beach.
Alice was squinting up at the sky through her nerdy rectangular glasses, trying to point out some constellations, when my mom interrupted her. “You know what’s a great story? It’s a Wonderful Life.” I was almost positive my mom had never sat through It’s a Wonderful Life—she hates black-and-white movies—but I let her continue for argument’s sake. “Why don’t people tell stories like that anymore? It’s a Wonderful Leg. That’s what you should call your book. It’s a Wonderful Leg and There’s Absolutely Nothing Wrong with It and My Mother Did the Best She Could in Spite of Having Cancer and Five Kids and a Husband Who Died of Fucking ALS.”
Well, there you have it.
I was almost thirty when I discovered, quite by accident, that I have cerebral palsy. No one had ever told me about my diagnosis, not my physical therapists or my orthopedic surgeon, and certainly not my parents.
I’ve always walked with a limp and I spent a good portion of my childh
The thing is, I didn’t ask about my leg because I thought I already knew everything there was to know about it. It was just a leg.
Imagine that.
I was born among the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis of East Peoria, Illinois, in a red-turreted hospital off Interstate 74. Scheduled to pop out vaginally the week after Thanksgiving, I was instead evicted by Cesarean in the predawn of an October morning in 1984, not more than eight hours after Mom started leaking amniotic fluid mid-frame at her monthly Entre Nous bowling tournament.
On my birthday, she liked to retell the tale of my traumatic birth. It involved her doing a headstand in her hospital bed to get me off the umbilical cord and concluded with me spending sixteen days in infant intensive care. At nine months, when I tried to pull myself up to the coffee table or couch, I sprang to the ball of my right foot, my tippy toes, and limped so badly I wore out the tops of shoes rather than the bottoms.
The brusque orthopedic specialist who diagnosed me with cerebral palsy at eighteen months didn’t appreciate the fact that I peed on the floor of the exam room. “He’s incontinent, too?” he allegedly said. Trying to lighten the mood, Mom noted my stifled, shuffling trot by quipping, “My son walks like Herman Munster.”
My leg was what brought us to Salt Lake City. Before my fourth birthday, we moved from our small town in Illinois for my first surgery: an Achilles tendon release on my right side. It would be the first of a handful of operations over the course of my childhood to relieve contractures in my heel and hamstrings, bringing me off my toes and freeing my gait.
As I got older, my parents simply told me I had “tight tendons” and left it at that, making it sound like I suffered from a vaguely Homeric physical ailment rather than a neurological one. My leg was nothing serious. Those pesky tight tendons, they just needed a little loosening up!
I can understand their flawed logic: My folks didn’t want me to feel crappy about myself, didn’t want me to stare down a lifetime of diminished expectations. They made the inherently ableist and probably correct-given-the-time-and-place calculation that it was safer for me to try to pass as an everyday, Wizard of Oz–loving, acne-riddled, thinks-he-can-actually-speak-French dork with a trophy case in his room full of collectible Barbies rather than as a kid living with a disability.
And so, my childhood continued apace, filled with Nerf wars, school musicals, tennis lessons, pretend news broadcasts from the living room, and my mom’s never-ending battle with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. You know, typical kid shit.
Mom and Dad were both born and bred in southern Idaho, so moving back to the Mountain West was a sort of homecoming. We have Mormon relatives on my dad’s side but because of my mom’s Basque upbringing—the result of adoption, not genetics—we were raised Catholic. I suppose being outcasts on religious grounds in a predominantly Mormon neighborhood provided a kind of pre-education for being gay and disabled. Our training in the ways of the Beehive State was what you’d call practical rather than theological and it would continue, in one way or another, for my entire childhood. Whether you want it or not, when you live in Utah you get the dirt on polygamy and missionaries and baptism for the dead, black magic, and golden tablets. As a general rule, Mormons can’t stop talking about being related to Brigham Young and non-Mormons can’t stop bitching about the state’s restrictive liquor laws.
Our suburb, Holladay, didn’t have a seedy underbelly. It had an undergarment. If you didn’t know what to look for, you would think Holladay was like anywhere else, the ghostly outline of its strangeness just visible under the most ordinary clothes.
Like many other houses in Holladay, our big redbrick 1980s family home had been built with a plethora of walk-in pantries to stockpile nonperishables for the End Times. Picture a place where salvation is served like a warm plate of cookies left on a doorstep. A seminary building or ward—with its needlepoint steeple and satellite dish tuned to the signal coming from Temple Square—was conveniently within walking distance of every public junior high and high school so kids could receive religious instruction as part of their school day. The Church owned, and still owns, the local NBC affiliate. When I was a teenager, they didn’t air Conan until past midnight and they didn’t air Saturday Night Live at all. These were grave affronts. Who wants to sit through reruns of Suddenly Susan and Mad About You when you’re in the mood for Camel Toe Annie and the Masturbating Bear?
In this von Trapp world, the Marshalls stuck out.
I’d like to think I’m not the sort of aging gay man who plops down at lunch and comes at you with a hundred crazy stories, but of course I am. I have one of those families. I once overheard someone at a party describe us as a bunch of unlikable assholes who happened to have a great dad—and that was coming from a friend. We’ve been through a lot and none of it seems to have made us better people. It’s just made us more us.
Every day growing up was like an ABC Afterschool Special in which no lessons were learned, no wisdom gleaned, and I think at some point it started to annoy people, or just exhaust them.
My mom, Debi, was a local cancer celebrity with an inspirational newspaper column who would turn to prescription drugs to treat her bone pain and grief once my dad got sick.
Tiffany, the eldest of the five of us kids, bore the brunt of my mom’s failing health and became the classic rebellious teenager, a vegetarian snowboarder sluffing school and disappearing up the mountain. She was either royally pissed off at the world or pissing her pants laughing, nothing in between. Mom named Tiffany after her childhood dog. In those years she liked to say, “The bitch is implied.”
My brother, Danny—DJ—was the wisecracking big brother. He bit his hand whenever he was keyed up and terrorized my friends and made a fart joke every other word.
Michelle, or Mitch, is half Kiowa and half Navajo in an otherwise white family related by blood. Upon hearing my sister-to-be was an Indian (still the word we used), I, a towheaded six-year-old, lobbied to name her Sacagawea and hoped aloud to our pediatrician that she would be able to speak our language. Mitch was just a few days old when she arrived at our house in January 1990, sporting what I took to be a mohawk. Well-intentioned but misguided, racist but kind of cute about it, I wore dreamcatcher necklaces and collected arrowheads in her honor and showed up to school in one of my mom’s long black chemo wigs and a buckskin jacket with fringe for my third-grade report on Geronimo. Planning her escape from an early age, Mitch collected backpacks, wandered around the house conspicuously reading A Child Called “It,” and hid the Book of Mormon under her mattress.
My youngest sister, Mona, aka Moe, aka Moeham, was the late-arriving whoopsie baby who Han Solo-ed out of my mom’s lymphoma-filled uterus just before cancer shut things down for good. Starting life with a pink bow stuck to her scalp with Vaseline and a mustache of tape under her microscopic nose, Moe soon leapt out of her crib, karate-kicked her ventilator, and began running around the house like a nut. We called her Monster Moe because calling her a little shit wasn’t going to fly in Utah.
You’ll hang out with all of the Marshalls but for now we can excuse them for a coffee break. Take five, fam! Seriously, fuck off for a minute! It’s my turn.
A writer may appear to be writing about other people but he’s only ever really writing about himself. What are siblings and parents if not alternate versions of ourselves, understudies who occasionally steal the scene? If I’m throwing everyone else under the short bus with my admittedly reductive frame, we may as well get back to the member of my family most likely to appear in an Afterschool Special: Hello again. I’m Greg, a gay guy with a limp, a dick that sometimes doesn’t work, and an adolescent addiction to Accutane.
