Body, Remember.

• Author: Ervin, Mike
• Position: Brief Article

by Kenny Fries Dulton. 225 pages. $21.95.

Poet, author, and creative-writing professor, Kenny Fries explores the frustrations and futility of trying to pass as nondisabled. Fries was born with legs and feet twisted and deformed. He has three toes on each foot.

"Throughout my early records," he writes, "two medical terms are prominent: valgus, which means knock-kneed; and equinus, alluding to horse's hooves, meaning my feet were like closed fists."

His childhood and adolescence were filled with leg surgeries that left him with a "constellation" of scars. During his many hospital stays, he felt like a guinea-pig and endured all kinds of humiliation. "Not bothering to draw the curtain around my bed, one doctor pulls up my bed sheets and, even though [their work is] not related to my current medical problem, the interns gawk at my legs. As the doctors talk behind their clipboards . . . I just lie there, smiling. Without asking permission to do so, they use my body as an example of what miracles the masters of medical science can perform."

This is a common childhood trauma for kids with disabilities. Their families spend enormous amounts of time and energy on the great medical quest for what are often at best purely cosmetic benefits. The depth of the preoccupation can breed a debilitating sense of shame and denial. It delivers the message to the child that it's worth going to any lengths to avoid being disabled.

Thus, Fries carries a determination to keep his disability hidden well past adolescence. A gay man, he tells of disguising himself in bars. "I would plant myself at a table or on a stool at the bar and...