…I mean, what if your thing is disabled black kids, what then? It’s a fucking shock to realize that what gets you off is little dark kids with their gnarled cerebral palsy hands. That is _not_ something that becomes immediately fucking evident when you’re growing up.
It takes thirty-one years to make the connection between being six, and seeing a little black girl, in a wheelchair, pawing at her pussy with one of her badly coordinated claws, and the fact that you have never had a meaningful long lasting relationship with a woman, _and_ you have to work like it’s your job to get an orgasm.
How it happens is: one day you’re jerkin’ it, settling in for the 20 to 30 minute ordeal that is getting you off. Before you know it you’re cumming like a fire hose and you don’t know why. After you finish and clean up, you start looking around your room for what the hell it was you saw that got you so hot. For a minute there, you think you believe in God.
Then you see it: an issue of “Time” you were reading last night before going to sleep. As you drifted off, the magazine slid from your chest to the floor and fell open. Right in front of your fucking eyes is a little black boy in a wheelchair with a big stupid, “I can overcome anything” smile on his damn face and a couple of curled little sticks for hands.
I mean, honestly, at first I didn’t take it for what it was, I just knew that something stirred in me whenever I looked at the photograph of that little boy. It took time for the full realization to set in.
It happened like this: I was staring intently at the photograph, sitting at the table in my kitchen. Under the bright white light of the overhead lamp, I squinted down at the photo, staring diligently at the center of the boy’s forehead, as if I could plumb the depths of his mind in this way and pull forth the answers that I was searching so desperately for.
And then I realized that I had an erection.
Of course, I was stunned, unable to act, but I had to know if what I was suddenly thinking was true. I unzipped my pants, closed my eyes, and imagined my hands exploring the wheelchair boy’s body; his features, in my mind, contorting in short gasps of pleasure.
I orgasm in _thirty seconds_, barely enough time to get his shirt off, but it’s amazing, and I actually feel a modicum of relief in the afterglow of the experience. The lotus blossom of knowledge had bloomed in my mind.
Of course, I did some research. Adult retards: no good. White kids: nothing doing. I mean, how does an obsession become this completely specific?
It takes six years of masturbating to video tapes of the Special Olympics for you to decide that it’s time to take it to the next level. You start hypothesizing about what could happen for you if you managed to realize this dream you’d been nurturing for so long. I imagined a world where I was finally able to find love… with someone my own age. The part of my personality that had always felt unfulfilled and bored would brim with a confidence born of achievement and closure. At no point did I consider the idea that I would go to prison for a very long time, and be treated very badly. My world didn’t have room for that eventuality -- all I could think about was getting married and having children.
It made me want to call up all of my old girlfriends and say: “I figured it out! It’s not that I don’t love you, I just wanna fuck retards. Don’t you see? I could never love you, not until I learned to love myself!”
So, you do a little research: the internet tells you which schools in your city play host to disabled kids.
You find yourself sitting outside of elementary schools for hours, letting your eyes mentally undress eight-year-olds that can only move their heads to throw up on themselves.
You sit there, day after day, for weeks, months, whatever, when you become as obsessed and single-minded as this, everything else starts to lose focus. You get cocky and start taking photos. Soon, you have an entire wall of your bedroom covered with photographs of smiling (well, sometimes smiling, other times they just stare blankly at nothing, as if they’re already gazing at death -- which is a deceptively erotic look.) children coming from and going to school.
Every night, before going to sleep, you sit on the edge of your bed in your boxer shorts, and stare at the collage of faces and bodies. At some point, you stopped masturbating altogether, your purpose, so focused, could only be fulfilled in reality. You’re sitting on a treasure trove of porn dedicated to your own personal brain malfunction, and you’re back to where you started: unable to get an erection.

The question that you need an answer to is: how do you get alone with one of them? It seems like disabled kids _always_ have someone with them, sometimes even when they’re in the bathroom. I knew that if I just gave it enough time, an idea would present itself to me and I’d see the straight line down the center, which ended in a blinking red sign that spelled out: a-b-s-o-l-u-t-i-o-n.
In the middle of the night, you shoot upright in your bed, bewildered and fully conscious. The answer is fresh in your mind, and your path is clear: _you become the bus driver that takes the retards to school in the morning and home at the end of the day_.
Feeling the satisfaction of a small victory, you allow yourself to drift off into a deep, comfortable sleep; a light smile playing at the corner of your lips. In your dreams you see yourself in a gray uniform staring down an impossibly long bus, which seems to stretch into eternity, leering at the little boy from the magazine article that started it all years ago.
Only here he doesn’t look happy; he looks scared and grotesque. He’s crying and screaming; he’s slurring for his mommy. And in the morning, you wake up slowly, your skin clammy and cold, but your insides burning with the conviction to see this through.
Let me be the first to tell you: it is hard to get a job as a school bus driver; fucking hard and fucking frustrating, and ultimately fucking fruitless. Those motherfuckers do not quit… _ever_.
But that’s ok; the initial idea has opened your mind up to a slew of potential plans. Next, you join one of those big brother groups, where you get assigned a disadvantaged youth to help guide down the correct path in life. Given that your background reveals no proclivity towards having your breath catch in your throat when you see a black kid with no arms and legs, in a wheelchair, holding a kite with his teeth, you are approved to be a big brother.
You are crestfallen to learn that your ward is not in fact disabled in any way shape or form, and in fact is just impaired due to his parents’ own inability to grasp the basic ideas of child rearing. He is a quiet and sullen boy with an attraction to literature and dreams of a better life for himself.
You lie, brand him a troublemaker and have him removed from the program. It took you a while to “steal” your own things and plant them in his room, but you did it, and you did it well: another positive accomplishment. Things are looking up.
And when you get your second kid, it’s like angels come down from heaven, shower you with flower petals and sing songs extolling the praises of the Lord. The kid has a spinal injury from an overzealous father’s touch and can’t walk. Halle-fucking-lujah.
He is beautiful in your eyes, and for weeks and months, you nurture your friendship. You take things slow; allow the tension to build. You often break out into a sweat when you touch his soft, dark skin. His glasses, large, round and cheap, magnify the liquid brown pools of his eyes, where you often find yourself lost; swimming about in the soul of your first true love.
One day, when the two of you are alone at your house, after a big day of baseball and hot dogs, you wheel him into your bedroom kneel down in front of his chair, the wall of your “porn” looming in the background. You tell him that you want to play a special game that you’ve been thinking up for a long time, just for the two of you. As his smile of excitement and love beams directly into your face, and fuses your gaze of love with his, you suddenly find yourself unable to stop laughing and fall to the floor, tears coming to your eyes and convulsions racking your body, so intense is your delight.
…
That was yesterday; when I woke up today I didn’t feel dirty or ashamed, just incredibly stupid. Here I was: a grown man who had never had a meaningful relationship in his life, obsessing over sad, broken children… turning the diseased and the innocent into objects of sexual lust.
_I_ am a sad broken child.
I decided that I was done, and slowly, reverently, I pulled each photograph down from the wall and tossed it into a black plastic garbage bag. Staring on as each one floated down into the darkness, dropping out of my sight forever.
I felt that a grand statement of some sort needed to be made, so, I buried the bag in my backyard and went to a nursery. I bought a sapling, which I’ve planted over the spot in the yard where I know my lesson is buried. There’s a moral here, I just can’t tell you what it is yet. I have a metaphor though: as the tree grows stronger, so shall I.
This is the sort of journey that helps a person learn a lot about themselves and their place in the world. I feel as if I’m waking up from some terribly long and convoluted dream; the world is swimming back into focus. I am no longer the person that I was before, but I can see him from a distance and I know that he was very, _very_ stupid. I know now that I am not a slave to, but the master of myself. I am free.