High Wire Act In A Wheelchair
Sun Herald
Saturday April 22, 1995
DON'T WORRY, HE WON'T GET FAR ON FOOT
By John Callahan
Statics Books paperback $17.95
JOHN Callahan is one of the new breed of American in-your-face, politically incorrect cartoonists who excite outrage and admiration in equal measure.
This is his life story, and it's no laughing matter. But Callahan being Callahan, it's not a sob story either.
You might ask why anyone would want to read the life story of a cartoonist: they just sit around thinking evil thoughts and drawing, don't they? Callahan does sit around a lot but that's because he's a quadriplegic. This account of his journey from alcoholic quadriplegic to notorious cartoonist is unique for its searing honesty, coruscating sense of humour and the sheer courage of the man.
Callahan lost the use of most of his body in a drunken car smash shortly before his 21st birthday. He had run off the rails years before. By the age of 12, incarcerated in a militaristic Catholic school (his nuns are sublimely dreadful), he was already an angry, depressed alcoholic. The anger was mostly directed at his large adoptive Catholic family, particularly his authoritarian father.
The author drops his bravado in his account of waking up paralysed and enduring the terrors of intensive care and these chapters are deeply disturbing. But he rallies - and his depiction of the para wards in the rehabilitation hospital to which he graduated is both hilarious and horrifying.
The accident accelerated the drinking and deepened the self-hate, but the life force triumphed in the end, and Callahan survived. Barely. There can be few more dangerous occupations than drunken cripple (both Callahan words- he despises euphemisms).
Callahan's story is a refreshing change from the usual uplifting tales of triumph over handicap and adversity. He doesn't spare us the physical indignities of quadriplegia or the difficulties of finding carers who are less crazy and addicted than himself (it's OK to hate yourself but you don't want your minder to hate you too).
His emotional recovery began when he admitted alcoholism was a bigger problem than his paralysis. He joined AA, beat the booze and took up drawing again - holding a pen in his right hand and guiding it with his left.
Sober for the first time in 25 years, he looked for the cause of his depression and found it in his abandonment as a baby. He began searching for his biological parents. In one sense, it was too late - they were both dead - but at least he was able to construct a history for himself, an identity.
Callahan has been amusing and terrorising newspaper readers for 15 years now and is up there with cartoonists such as Gary Larsen. This is a brave book - a high wire act in a wheelchair - but although you'll shut your eyes occasionally, you don't really have to worry: Callahan makes it to the other side in one piece.
THE BOMBARDIERS
By Po Bronson
Secker & Warburg paperback $19.95
SNAPSHOTS FROM HELL
By Peter Robinson
Nicholas Brealey paperback $24.95
YOU don't sympathise with money movers? You think they deserved what they got at the end of the mad, bad 80s? Don't care if their hair falls out and self-doubt consumes them in their pursuit of obscene wealth? Well, you won't like these books.
If you're still with me, you'll be gratified to hear that Po Bronson, unlike most of the other financial cowboys turned author, can spin words - and that his novel about a maverick merchant bank and its loony employees is a fun read.
It's also a savage satire, thank God, because I doubt that there are many of us out there (in the book-reading public, anyway) who could feel the slightest empathy, let alone sympathy for the sales force at the fictitious Atlantic Pacific Corporation (formerly First Boston, it changes its name, decor and stationery each time its name becomes "mud on the street").
Emotional basket cases all, they are voluntary slaves to 4am starts, 11-hour days, emotional and financial blackmail. And a highly-inventive range of addictions (tooth flossing, pulling out hair - there must be a medical term for this - chocolate bars, the full pharmacopoeia).
In Bronson's fast and furious tale, we follow their careers - particularly that of their top gun Sid Geeder, also known as the "mortgage king", as the bank implodes from its own greed.
Some get fired, one disappears, one dies at his desk, others walk out. Totally lacking in loyalty to each other, they fight for the accounts of departed colleagues, play stupid jokes and try to steal Geeder's sales methods - all the time manipulated and bullied by their Simon Legree-like sales manager, Coyote Jack.
The system begins to fall apart when the firm hires a young maverick, Eggs Igino.
He is so good at selling worthless bonds that the firm launches the scam of a lifetime, depending on him to unload it on the unsuspecting market. This isn't your everyday rort like pushing savings and loan bail-out bonds, it's Leeson-like in its ambition - a bond issue to finance a leveraged buyout of the Dominican Republic.
But they've misjudged Eggs, who bails out, leaving the benighted sales force to take up the slack. One by one, they fall apart, except for ... but that would be telling.
In Snapshots From Hell , a self-promoter called Peter Robinson tries to gain our sympathy for the horrors he endured as a humanities type (a "poet") doing an MBA at Stanford Business School.
Robinson is not an endearing personality. For a start, he's a shameless name-dropper, inserting Scott Turow into the first paragraph of the author's note and the former President of the United States, George Bush, for whom he was a speechwriter (he also scribed for Ronald Reagan) into the first sentence of the prologue. He's also a self-congratulatory whinger.
So it's hard work doing an MBA; the pressure is killing (though totally artificial) and your self-image suffers as you watch the mathematically gifted surge ahead. But (a) nobody forces you to kill yourself for money and status; (b) MBAs from prestigious business schools are snapped up on graduation and (c) most go on to earn ridiculous amounts of money making rich people richer.
Getting a PhD in history or science is also a grind and the financial and professional prospects are dismal. Does Robinson really expect the rest of us "poets" to feel sorry for him?
After all the fuss, Robinson decided he didn't want to do the boring grind of money moving, so he found a job at the Hoover Institution writing about business and politics.
There's something schizophrenic and disingenuous about this book.
But you don't have to accept my verdict on this one. I'm probably just biased against self-serving plutocrats. After all, the NY Times reviewer praised it and the author of something called The Leadership Secrets of Attila the Hun reckons it's full of "brilliant, entertaining insight".
© 1995 Sun Herald