A Retarded Story

The story I’m about to tell happened this very Monday in the bus. I didn’t realize what had happened until much later tonight. I was far too tired to understand the full implications of the situation. It is much later, after deep thinking about what had happen, that I realized how serious and how horrible this story is.

Before I start, I have to introduce our main character, Daniel. Daniel isn’t a normal teenager: Daniel is trisomic. It’s pretty apparent when you see him, really: he has eyes half-closed, talk slowly in a very odd manner and he looks like he has smoked more weed than Bob Marley before a show. He really look retarded, his mouth always opened, exposing his tongue. My mother works in a mental health hospital. She said that the most severe cases of trisomy end up with the patient “putting their and in their ass, looking for black gold”. Her words (and experiences), not mine.

Daniel lives with his mother at the other end of my street. His father left shortly after Daniel had been diagnosed with trisomy, leaving the mother alone to take care of him. He never sent one cent to help them neither. He just left overnight and stopped caring about them. He was a real kind of idiot, too. Very conservative, very “old school”: women at home to raise kids, hunting + beer rock, etc. He was the perfect kind of egoistical asshole. He has always blamed his wife for “making Daniel half-human” (his words). My mother told me he blamed her for all the problems. He even told his wife before he left: “You had ONE duty to do as a woman - and you failed at it”. You see the kind of guy.

His wife never accepted it. She never found another guy and never had another kid. I think she was interiorly too afraid of having another trisomic kid.

Daniel is now nearly 20. He works at the McDonalds in our town. My first idea was that every McDonalds worker eventually end up like that. My second was that despite his illness, he was probably the smartest employee there. He is the one taking the trashes out, cleaning the bathrooms and doing all the dirty job no one wants to do. An apparent win-win situation: he gets a feeling of being useful, other employees don’t have to clean shit, his parents make money, his employeur can deduce half of his pay and customers get a wonderful show of a retarded kid eating trashes (I exaggerate a bit: let’s just say that if you dropped fries on the ground, he would eat them. I guess you could have him wear a sign “Do not feed the retard”. Anyway.) I wonder if I could make money like that. Make a dozen of retarded kids and have them work at minimum wages, 8,50$ per hour * 8 hours *5 days *12 kids = 4,080$ per week, non-taxable. Hey, I wouldn’t even need to feed them - they eat trash anyway (not that there is a difference between eating at McDonalds and from the trashes). Okay, I confess: the reason I am being so mean is because he represents one of my primal fears: having a disabled kid. I wouldn’t be as shitty as his father, abandoning him, but still, I wouldn’t know what to do. There is no doubt my life would be hell, no matter what. I’ll tell you: this little boy is very courageous. He has found a way to function in society despite everything being against him. I admire him for that.

He often takes the bus with his mother to get to job. Of course, he can’t really take the bus alone, so she often goes with him. As a disabled kid, he gets the privilege of being able to travel on every circuit for free. He just has to show a card saying he is disabled and he can enter any bus at any time. Okay, here’s what happened that traumatised me.

This morning, he got in the bus with his mother. He was like he had always been: mouth opened, weird eyes, odd posture, walking a bit randomly, etc. The mother paid the driver for her trip . She was about to get the card saying her son was disabled and that he could travel for free when the driver told her this:

“Oh, don’t bother. No need for a card to see he’s retarded”.

Retarded. Wow. He said this jokingly, almost laughing. But it wasn’t funny. At all.

The mother looked at the ground, slowly. The pain of being reminded, each morning, that your kid is DISABLED (not RETARDED) and that the whole world makes fun of you.