 |
 |
(continued) When people realize they are paralyzed, many of them spiral down into a depression or denial. Some people live their lives in denial, never accepting it. John admits contemplating death, but that didn’t last long. The doctor’s words stuck with him. But it was more than that. John had always been headstrong and rebellious, even as a child. He never just gave in. And he certainly didn’t stick to the norm. Most kids during middle school and high school shy away from confrontations with bullies. John did not shy away. He went looking for bullies who picked on other kids—just in order to defend them. John would go looking for the biggest, baddest, meanest bullies to teach them a lesson, and teach it to them well. He only had one problem. He couldn’t physically take them down. But that didn’t stop John from trying. He would keep fighting and provoking the bully—until he got the crap beat out of him, or his brother Mike, who was ten times bigger and bulkier, would stop by and even the playing field. No matter how the previous situation had panned out, John was always ready for the next bully—determined to teach the bully his my-mind-is-stronger-than-your-big-matter principle. “It’s the best thing that ever happened to me,” John says now about his motorcycle accident, without hesitation. Since his accident, John still remains a curiosity. His sense for adventure and mischief still cause him problems, but now the problems take on different forms because of his disability. One day, he was fixing the engine of his car and was sitting on the radiator for quite a while before he smelled something burning. Because he doesn’t have sensation below his chest, he didn’t know he had been burning his butt cheeks. He had to go to the hospital to get skin grafts because he had second- and third-degree burns. But still, John didn’t stop. He continued repairing engines, building machines and welding metal—even if that meant dragging his lower body and pulling himself up into a lifted car, or accidentally and unknowingly lighting his leg on fire from sparks that flew off while he was welding, or using hand-brakes instead of his feet to drive his cars at alarming speeds. Not long after his motorcycle accident, John began to play wheelchair tennis. First it started out as an activity he did to help his then-girlfriend practice to make the tennis high school team. When he was practicing one day a man approached him and asked him if he wanted to join a group of people that did wheelchair tennis at Cypress College. John took the invitation and played for 15 years after that, getting sponsored, traveling to Japan for tournaments, and rising up the tennis rankings to the highest division. When John first started playing wheelchair tennis, his wheelchair needed some modifications. And he had to be comfortable and well-equipped in his chair to improve his tennis game. John decided to take the long, four-hour drive up north to visit his wheelchair manufacturer. When he arrived at the place, they didn’t alter or fix anything on his wheelchair; they didn’t even attempt to offer a solution. Furious, John did a lot of thinking on his four-hour drive back home. When he arrived at his house in Orange County, John and his brother Mike Box began to modify John’s wheelchair. This whole ordeal became the catalyst behind John’s future business. Colours-N-Motion was established when John Box decided he had enough of unhelpful, uncaring and rude wheelchair manufacturers. He started the company in 1991 and was officially incorporated in 1992. John did a year of number-crunching and market research before he decided to start his company. His brother, Mike, now known as “The Wheelchair Guru,” helped John to modify chairs and come up with new, inventive ways of building them to be more accessible and more customized to the individual. As part of the marketing campaign, Colours used strong body language and controversial photos in their ads. The ads featured images of a bare-bellied pregnant lady in a wheelchair, a man with dreadlocks smiling at the camera, and a woman in a sensual pose lying on her back with her wheelchair tipped over—and they all carried captions on the top—“birth,” “philosophy,” and “sensuality.” These ads rebelled against the status quo of advertisements for disabled people. They weren’t safe, or boring, or sugar-coated—they were in-your-face, semi-nude shots of disabled people trying to express bold attitudes. The controversy exploded on the scene when writers for newspapers, medical professionals and everyday consumers thought that the photos were too graphic or misleading in one way or another. These people began to write letters to newspapers, publish articles in magazines, and write letters to John Box himself at how appalled they were. John didn’t mind. He had gotten free publicity for Colours and it didn’t bother him to be controversial or a bit rebellious—he relished it. *** At forty-three years old, John is still an “anomaly” as a Colours brand representative has said. John isn’t what you’d expect of a guy in a wheelchair, but then again the expectations the general public has of people in wheelchairs are traditionally associated with pity and physical incompetence, accompanied by an alien-like curiosity of how people live their lives in wheelchairs. And John’s never allowed people to pity him, or settled for incompetence—with or without a wheelchair. As for being something of a curiosity, well, John was a curiosity long before his accident. On one of his first visits to the hospital, John was already setting the stage for the years to come. When he was three years old, he broke his arm playing with a neighborhood friend. He had been in the air balancing himself on his stomach while an older boy lay on his back, propping John up with his feet. John lost his balance and landed on his arm. He never even cried. The hospital personnel were thoroughly impressed with John’s calm demeanor—not crying and hysteria-free, at an age where getting lost in the supermarket usually means the world has collapsed. The youngest of three boys, John gave his older brothers a run for their money. John and his oldest brother Mike would compete for the blue-and-purple glory of who could get the most bruises, broken arms, and stitches. Looking back at those childhood days now, John just brushes it off as “minor stuff.” John and Mike are the closest of the three boys, because they both love hands-on joy rides, and gimme-some-action antics. John didn’t really keep girls around for very long during his high school years—perhaps they couldn’t handle his 140-mile-an-hour driving, or maybe they lost interest when he’d rather be installing a 395 big-block engine in his Camaro than cooing “I love you-s” over the phone. From childhood to adolescence, John had a gift for injuring himself in daring activities that always involved a head rush of adrenaline. The staff at the hospital began to know the Box boys quite well. Mike and John had earned such a name for themselves. When their mom entered the hospital, one of the staff would say:
It was usually John with a broken bone, or Mike in need of some stitches. John’s leisure time was a sure bet for danger-prone activities. Like that one time that John and his friends tipped over a parked car as a prank, or the time when he put a gaping hole in the oil pan of his father’s Pinto from trying to jump hills with the car, or the time that he burned his tires at 70 miles per hour on the freeway, or the time they went floating down the riverbed in Orange County on a waterbed as they were being scolded over a helicopter loudspeaker, or maybe even the time that they stole a man’s wheelchair and used it to dump each other into a lagoon at Knott’s Berry Farm. |
|
| UCI | School of Humanities | Literary Journalism |