Eugene and Me

I briefly mentioned yesterday thatI'm in the middle of the scanning project, Scanning hundreds of images into my hard drive in an attempt to organize my computer room and get rid of a lot of the clutter which has plagued me for literally years. The project has proved most tedious. However I plan to continue the effort until I have all the images on the hard drive and organized into some kind of meaningful folders. I can across this image buried deep in one of the folders and brought up lots of old memories..

This image is of myself and a friend of mine, Eugene. We met at the Elks rehabilitation center in Boise Idaho in 1966. We both had broken our necks and were quadriplegic. Eugene was a little older than me maybe about a year. He broke his neck out on a Boy Scout project. He and I were pretty different and our disabilities be in our commonality. Our level of injury was pretty close to the same however I do think Eugene's injury may have been slightly higher than mine his level of functioning was a little less than mine. We ended up hanging out a lot pretty much by default. The only other person who went through rehab at the same time that we did lived in Seattle when he was gone he was gone. So we Ended up hanging out because there was no one else to hang with. But we were pretty much opposites For example I was a Mormon gene was a Roman Catholic I couldn't do anything and Eugene could do anything. He smoked cigarettes, drank beer and did we do to get away with it. Perhaps one of the reasons I put up with Eugene as long as I did as he was my source for tobacco and alcohol it was kind of fun to push Gene to his limits. Eugene sort of acted like a tough guy who probably wasn't BK, Bishop Kelly high school where he attended up to his accident. I don't think he ever went back following is that neck break. But in reality, it probably was because of his spinal cord injury that he pulled into himself and I really think sort of afraid of the whole world. That was a big difference between us. My parents really did not treat me all that different after my disability except that I wasn't able to work as much around the house or was given work around the house. It was pretty much the same. I was expected to continue my rehabilitation at home as well is attending school. Eugene stopped his education, treated his parents poorly in many ways viciously to the point where he basically disowned his parents a year or so after his trauma and relocated to a long-term care facility, old folks home, downtown Boise which I marveled at. Eugene got some kind of settlement of the Boy Scouts lots of money to l led to pretty much what he wanted. Eugene have his own room at Restful manner, truly that was the name of joint. As I said Eugene smoke dope whenever you get it, he was in love with the hippie lifestyle kinda fantasized about being on. Eugene was the only person I knew who had a subscription to the Berkeley Barb. I would visit Eugene once or twice a week. My mom would drop me off after school and my dad picked me up on his way home. We would watch television, order pizza, smoke cigarettes and talk about California and everything else we didn't know anything about. Many times I would just take off after my time Eugene and begin rolling home where either my dad would pick me up for somebody else would pick me up usually take home. Eugene thought I was crazy would never do anything like that that is the difference.

I cannot say Eugene and I were close, I used him as much as he used me ever used each other. As I write this document I'm surprised at how many experiences I remember way more than I thought and way more to put In one posting. It might be a fun project to put some of these thoughts down maybe some stories about some of our adventures. Anyway that's a little more poop on the image above stay tuned.