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Jerry Lewis Told Me I Was Going to Die: Essays
Disability may be his lot, but he decided long-ago not to let it control his fate. A collection of humorous essays centered on life with a disability. These essays give a wry look at the obstacles faced while growing up in a small town in Northern Ontario.
- GenresDisability
285 pages, Paperback
Published May 6, 2023
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May 10, 2023
During the almost fifteen years I spent as a PSW I supported a wide variety of people with physical disabilities and, to be honest, I was often reluctant to ask questions of an overtly personal nature regarding their "disabilities", worried that my inquiries would be invasive, at best, and at worst, that focusing too much on the disability itself would make me just an another ableist who couldn't see the person beyond the "handicap". Still, curious minds being what they are, I’ll concede that I oftentimes wanted to broach the subject with the people I supported in more depth which is why I was so glad to discover that Sudbury’s Latitude 46 would be publishing Jerry Lewis Told Me I Was Going To Die, Capreol writer Matthew Del Papa's book of essays on just that very subject. While ostensibly this collection of essays does fill in plenty of the blanks for this, or any, inquiring mind, in regards to what it's like to live life in a wheelchair, that’s the least of its pleasures. Propelled by the author's sardonic, and often self-deprecating, wit the book proceeds with the same kind of rambling fury which infuses my favourite breed of conversation and just like with those, no topic is too profane, or profound, to warrant omission while laughter is rarely more than a breath or, in this case, a page away.
To co-opt a comment he made as a footnote in “Good Old Accessible U” — a chapter in which he discusses an all-too-successful job interview he once had at Sudbury's Laurentian University and one that should be mandatory reading for anyone working in Human Resources — much of the book’s indomitable charm has “everything to do with the absolute brutal honesty [he] employs when being interviewed. There is no prevaracation or obfuscation. [He] lays everything on the table and, usually, leaves [his] interrogator baffled by [his] forthrightness.” Baffled, perhaps, but no doubt he left just as indelible impression on his “interrogator” as he has on me (the same impression, I suspect, he’ll leave with any reader who spends even a moment perusing the musings in this collection.) And while his “brutal honesty” is what makes this collection truly shine, Matthew is far too nuanced a writer to allow his forthrightness about his AMS to overwhelm the reader with a lingering sense of pathos, or really any sense of pathos at all. Take, for example, “In Case Of Emergency”, a chapter which resonated particularly deeply with me for how similar his perspective on how he uses personal trauma to inform his fiction, even as he writes fiction to lessen its impact, was so startlingly similar to my own.
This is how he starts it:
“What’s sadder than a ten-year-old walking home through the rain? A crippled ten-year-old driving his electric wheelchair home through a late autumn deluge and getting intentionally drenched by passing cars. Living through this humiliating bit of childhood misery, I swore I’d never get caught out unprepared again.”
And therein lies the heart of the book. Instead of lingering on “this humiliating bit of childhood misery” he uses it to highlight how his AMS, rather than simply restricting his mobility, has provided him with a unique perspective, and an urgency, which I suspect most authors — particularly those of us who’ve been called to write fiction — will find intimately relatable. Coming to grips with childhood fears, irrational or otherwise, certainly motivated much of my own early attempts at prose and so it was with a deepening affinity that I read, a few pages later, when he writes about how “fear would run rampant” in his mind every time he was left alone upstairs during fire alarms at school as he “sat and sniffed the air, trying to convince [him]self that any errant odour wasn’t smoke…as [he] endured long minutes of solitary uncertainty.” He’s then quick to note that “Around others, though, I faked resignation. Pretending that emergencies never worried me became second nature. I even laughed off the awkward questions that followed these drills.”
He then recounts how a well-intentioned principal had the school purchase “a terrifying machine…meant to carry me down the stairs” in the event of a real fire. While being strapped into this “seat bolted onto rubber tank treads…proved to be a nightmarish ride” for Mat, I found myself smiling ever-wider as he described the ordeal, if only because I imagined him wearing the same look of grim resolve plastered on his face to conceal his abject terror as I myself often wore when riding the demonic, child-hating pinto my equally well-intentioned mother bought for me and my sisters after we’d moved onto a farm when I was roughly the same age as he was.
A short time later, Mat reveals that as a young boy, “I lay awake in bed at night and relive each and every one of my shockingly numerous near-death experiences. That is bad enough but I cannot stop there. No, I take things further still and spin out worst-case scenarios with such vividness that they almost feel real.” Having myself spent many a night as a child lying in bed spinning out worst case scenarios with such vividness that they almost feel real — and knowing full well that such ruminations are what molded me into the writer I am today — I couldn’t help but nod along while I read these words. Perhaps that’s why I was slightly discomfited when he begins the section immediately following the above passage with, “Being disabled means I have plenty to fear”, for thinking my own (mostly) irrational fears were any match for his, when even something as innocuous for the able-bodied as crossing a street can become a life-threatening ordeal for those in a wheelchair.
But again, Matthew isn’t fishing for anything even approximating commiseration by exposing such day-to-day realities, a point he makes eminently clear in the chapter’s final paragraphs. There he compares his own experiences with emergencies to the multibillion-dollar industry surrounding “preppers” (though I would suggest this chapter’s concluding remarks are just as easily applicable to any social justice activist). “Emergencies are no joke,” he writes. “A lifetime of worry has taught me better than to rely on the government in times of crisis. Trusting my health to people elected into power isn’t the smartest survival strategy…Around the world many forward-thinking citizens are, instead, taking steps of their own. Planning ahead and readying themselves for potential problems. Exactly as one wet cripple did more than three decades ago as he drove his wheelchair home through the rain.
“And that is not sad at all.”
Truer words have rarely been written and it’s a credit to Matthew's deft approach to the pieces included in this collection that such passages are so commonplace that in the weeks since I first read Jerry Lewis Told Me I Was Going To Die the book has come to reside in my mind less as a collection of essays about someone who’s disabled and more and more as a Künstlerroman about a writer coming into his own, some might say against all odds (though, from what I've read here, I suspect Matthew never would.)
To co-opt a comment he made as a footnote in “Good Old Accessible U” — a chapter in which he discusses an all-too-successful job interview he once had at Sudbury's Laurentian University and one that should be mandatory reading for anyone working in Human Resources — much of the book’s indomitable charm has “everything to do with the absolute brutal honesty [he] employs when being interviewed. There is no prevaracation or obfuscation. [He] lays everything on the table and, usually, leaves [his] interrogator baffled by [his] forthrightness.” Baffled, perhaps, but no doubt he left just as indelible impression on his “interrogator” as he has on me (the same impression, I suspect, he’ll leave with any reader who spends even a moment perusing the musings in this collection.) And while his “brutal honesty” is what makes this collection truly shine, Matthew is far too nuanced a writer to allow his forthrightness about his AMS to overwhelm the reader with a lingering sense of pathos, or really any sense of pathos at all. Take, for example, “In Case Of Emergency”, a chapter which resonated particularly deeply with me for how similar his perspective on how he uses personal trauma to inform his fiction, even as he writes fiction to lessen its impact, was so startlingly similar to my own.
This is how he starts it:
“What’s sadder than a ten-year-old walking home through the rain? A crippled ten-year-old driving his electric wheelchair home through a late autumn deluge and getting intentionally drenched by passing cars. Living through this humiliating bit of childhood misery, I swore I’d never get caught out unprepared again.”
And therein lies the heart of the book. Instead of lingering on “this humiliating bit of childhood misery” he uses it to highlight how his AMS, rather than simply restricting his mobility, has provided him with a unique perspective, and an urgency, which I suspect most authors — particularly those of us who’ve been called to write fiction — will find intimately relatable. Coming to grips with childhood fears, irrational or otherwise, certainly motivated much of my own early attempts at prose and so it was with a deepening affinity that I read, a few pages later, when he writes about how “fear would run rampant” in his mind every time he was left alone upstairs during fire alarms at school as he “sat and sniffed the air, trying to convince [him]self that any errant odour wasn’t smoke…as [he] endured long minutes of solitary uncertainty.” He’s then quick to note that “Around others, though, I faked resignation. Pretending that emergencies never worried me became second nature. I even laughed off the awkward questions that followed these drills.”
He then recounts how a well-intentioned principal had the school purchase “a terrifying machine…meant to carry me down the stairs” in the event of a real fire. While being strapped into this “seat bolted onto rubber tank treads…proved to be a nightmarish ride” for Mat, I found myself smiling ever-wider as he described the ordeal, if only because I imagined him wearing the same look of grim resolve plastered on his face to conceal his abject terror as I myself often wore when riding the demonic, child-hating pinto my equally well-intentioned mother bought for me and my sisters after we’d moved onto a farm when I was roughly the same age as he was.
A short time later, Mat reveals that as a young boy, “I lay awake in bed at night and relive each and every one of my shockingly numerous near-death experiences. That is bad enough but I cannot stop there. No, I take things further still and spin out worst-case scenarios with such vividness that they almost feel real.” Having myself spent many a night as a child lying in bed spinning out worst case scenarios with such vividness that they almost feel real — and knowing full well that such ruminations are what molded me into the writer I am today — I couldn’t help but nod along while I read these words. Perhaps that’s why I was slightly discomfited when he begins the section immediately following the above passage with, “Being disabled means I have plenty to fear”, for thinking my own (mostly) irrational fears were any match for his, when even something as innocuous for the able-bodied as crossing a street can become a life-threatening ordeal for those in a wheelchair.
But again, Matthew isn’t fishing for anything even approximating commiseration by exposing such day-to-day realities, a point he makes eminently clear in the chapter’s final paragraphs. There he compares his own experiences with emergencies to the multibillion-dollar industry surrounding “preppers” (though I would suggest this chapter’s concluding remarks are just as easily applicable to any social justice activist). “Emergencies are no joke,” he writes. “A lifetime of worry has taught me better than to rely on the government in times of crisis. Trusting my health to people elected into power isn’t the smartest survival strategy…Around the world many forward-thinking citizens are, instead, taking steps of their own. Planning ahead and readying themselves for potential problems. Exactly as one wet cripple did more than three decades ago as he drove his wheelchair home through the rain.
“And that is not sad at all.”
Truer words have rarely been written and it’s a credit to Matthew's deft approach to the pieces included in this collection that such passages are so commonplace that in the weeks since I first read Jerry Lewis Told Me I Was Going To Die the book has come to reside in my mind less as a collection of essays about someone who’s disabled and more and more as a Künstlerroman about a writer coming into his own, some might say against all odds (though, from what I've read here, I suspect Matthew never would.)
May 29, 2023
Matthew Del Papa’s Jerry Lewis Told Me I Was Going to Die is described as a collection of essays. But while that might be technically accurate, Del Papa’s accounts are never dull, never stuffy, and not particularly rigid in their structure. Better to call them commentaries maybe, or anecdotes, recollections, even remonstrances. Call them eye-opening, revealing, and insightful. But be sure to also call them frank and funny. Sometimes silly, often poignant. Call them a collection that deserves to be read and enjoyed.
With great self-deprecating humour, Del Papa describes life with a debilitating condition that confines him to a wheelchair and causes his body to gradually weaken. One moment he’s revealing some of his greatest humiliations, and the next moment he’s skewering the clueless among us with our stupid questions, inappropriate jokes, and unwanted touches so regularly suffered by those with a handicap. Del Papa wants to change attitudes about people with disabilities, no question about that. But the tools he uses are quintessential Canadian humour and rigorous honesty.
Should you read Jerry Lewis Told Me I Was Going to Die? Yes. But, more importantly, you’ll want to read it. You’ll laugh, you’ll squirm, you’ll learn something. And you’ll be glad you did.
With great self-deprecating humour, Del Papa describes life with a debilitating condition that confines him to a wheelchair and causes his body to gradually weaken. One moment he’s revealing some of his greatest humiliations, and the next moment he’s skewering the clueless among us with our stupid questions, inappropriate jokes, and unwanted touches so regularly suffered by those with a handicap. Del Papa wants to change attitudes about people with disabilities, no question about that. But the tools he uses are quintessential Canadian humour and rigorous honesty.
Should you read Jerry Lewis Told Me I Was Going to Die? Yes. But, more importantly, you’ll want to read it. You’ll laugh, you’ll squirm, you’ll learn something. And you’ll be glad you did.
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