Of Wheelchairs and Scary Movies

A long time ago – 1980 to be exact – a movie called The Changeling came out and scared the bejus out of me, even though I never saw it. I didn’t have to, as the television ad left mark enough on a young boy with an overactive imagination.

From what I recall, the ad depicted a wheelchair – an old fashioned one, all wooden, basically a chair with wheels attached – sitting in the dark corner of an attic. The camera slowly circled and closed in on the wheelchair, while the sinister-voiced narrator intoned something along the lines of…

‘What happened to you Joseph?’
(ominous pause - closing in on wheelchair)
‘Why did they want you to go?’
(another pause – now the camera is right on top of the wheelchair)
‘And why do you still remain!?

…at which point the wheelchair spins around and roars across the floor at the shrieking individual foolish to investigate those strange noises coming from the attic.

Yeesh. That ad left me with a healthy respect for oddly creepy antiques left lying about people’s attics.

But I do have some happy memories surrounding wheelchairs. (Christ, did I just type that? Happy? Wheelchairs?) Namely the one my friend D stole many moons ago, although perhaps the word ‘stole’ is a misnomer. It implies a certain use of stealth, or guile, and D simply pushed this particular wheelchair down the street after finding it outside the hospital.

D brought the wheelchair home to B’s apartment, where it became a fixture in the living room. It was quite comfortable actually, certainly better than the floor, and had several other advantages, all due to it’s inherent mobility.

First of all, sitting in the wheelchair you were free of the dilemma faced at any crowded house party when you finished your beer: namely do I get up and get another, thereby risking losing my seat? Or do I wait until someone else gets up and try to prevail upon that person to bring me back a beer? If you had the wheel chair, well then, no problem – you simply wheeled yourself to the refrigerator, grabbed a new beer, and wheeled yourself back.

Even better, you could wheel yourself out of the apartment altogether if the occasion demanded it. There were a number of us living in different apartments in B’s building at the time, and if you felt like seeing what was going down on the 3rd floor, but weren’t feeling especially motivated, why, you could just roll yourself out the door and down to the elevator and the 3rd floor - all without leaving your comfy seat.

The wheelchair was also an extremely effective prop for random bits of guerilla street theater. A particular favorite: wheeling a friend half-way across the crosswalk at a red light, dumping him out of the chair, pretending to kick and beat him, grabbing his wallet, and running away. Always a hit with passing motorists.

Yes, that particular wheelchair was not scary at all. Sadly, it met it’s end long ago, in a tragic fall from a 10th floor window.