“Ninety-nine and a half just won’t do,” sings soul man Wilson Pickett to a reluctant lover. “Just won’t get it.” When it comes to disability access accommodations, Same thing applies.
By Joel Deutsch
I scrawled my signature where a precinct worker had his finger pressed down on what looked to me like a blank page in the voter registration book. Now I would request that someone accompany me to the voting booth. I’d done my homework. No explanations needed, not about the candidates or the state and local issues, either. Punch, punch, punch. Five minutes, tops. Probably less.
But then someone grabbed me by my elbow so abruptly that I almost dropped my white cane, and led me away to a smaller table.
“Sit down,” he said, pulling out a chair. I sat and found myself looking at a small, light-colored box. I ran my hand over it. It had a plastic shell. On its top surface were raised left , right, up and down arrows plus a large button encircled by a protective ridge to prevent it being accidentally pressed.
“this is our blind voting machine,” explained my new friend, hereinafter to be referred to as Dave. “You’re the first one to use it this election. Put these on.” He handed me a pair of headphones.
I listened but all I could hear was the chatter of the crowded room. I took off the headphones.
“Dave?” I asked. But Dave had disappeared. After a few long moments, he was back.
“What?” he sounded exasperated.
“Nothing’s coming over these, I said,” holding the phones out to him. “Have you ever tried to work this yourself?”
“That’s not necessary,” Dave huffed. “I don’t have to know how to use it. Just put on the headphones like I told you.” And then he was gone again.
this time, a man was already in the midst of reciting some instructions I’d missed the beginning of.
“Dave?” No answer. I set the headphones on top of the machine, got up and found my way over to the end of the main table. “Where’s Dave?” I asked the poll worker closest to me. A man, it turned out when he spoke.
“he’s not here.”
“Where did he keep going before, when I was trying to use that blind voting machine?” I asked. “did you see?”
“He had to do something on the computer over there against the wall. That’s how it works.”
“then where’s the precinct captain?” I asked. “I haven’t voted yet, and I can’t work that thing by myself.”
“Dave’s the precinct captain,” the man said. ” Now look, just leave me alone, okay? I’m busy, and you aren’t helping me.”
Despite my better intentions, I lost it. “It’s you who’s supposed to be helping me!” I snapped. I returned to my little table, took a seat again, and tried to regroup. I felt all around the side panels for some kind of start, pause and stop switches, but found nothing other than the tiny chrome ring of the headphone jack.
Maybe I should just forget it and go home, I considered ruefully. American democracy would surely survive without my participation this time. But the thought failed to console. I just couldn’t accept being so absurdly disenfranchised.
“Remember me? We folded our clothes next to each other at the laundromat a few weeks ago.” The voice was female, thirtysomething.
Veronica, let’s say was her name. She was an actress, and I’d enjoyed our chat much more than I’d enjoyed talking to the man who bent my ear by the dryers on another laundry day about how the pyramids at Giza had to have been built by extraterrestrials, or the Hillary Clinton supporter who, during the Presidential primary campaign, assured me that only affirmative action could have gotten Barak Obama elected President of the Harvard Law Review
“I’ve just finished voting,” she said, and I saw you sitting here. “Is there anything I can help you with?”
A few minutes later, out on the sidewalk, my savior introduced me to a male friend who was waiting for her. They’d offer me a ride home, Veronica said, except that she was on her way to an audition for a commercial. As she spoke, I found myself wondering what Veronica actually looked like, beyond the nearly generic medium-sized human figure my eyes could still see was there. I wondered what her friend looked like. Wondered what the long line of restless shadows waiting to get into the polling place looked like.
Actually, I wonder all the time what everybody looks like. And, not having exchanged a smile, a frown or even just indifferent glances with anyone for something like ten years, I am always wondering at one level of consciousness or another how a person survives such profound isolation as the loss of faces, let alone the total invisibility of other human beings, which will be my lot if I should outlive my last photoreceptor cells, brings on.
“You know,” she said, “you kind of surprised me.”
“How?” I asked.
“I mean, you voted exactly the same as I did, on everything.”
I understood. I was probably about twice her age, and I was wearing ordinary, off-the-rack casual clothes, not exactly the sartorial semiotics of hipness and liberality in Los Angeles.
I thanked Veronica for her help, wished her good luck with the audition, and headed off for the nearest bus stop while she and her friend went the other way to get their car. One end of my I Voted sticker was already unpeeling itself from my shirt pocket, and as I walked along I pressed it back down. Maybe if I’d worn a cotton shirt instead of permanent press polyester that morning, I thought, the sticker might have stayed put, and maybe Veronica wouldn’t have been quite so surprised.
This story first appeared under the title Almost Independence Day in the Fall 2008/Winter 2009 issue of the online literary quarterly R-KV-R-Y
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