Tuesday 5th May.
Wade tells me the Clubhouse isn't so much about socailisation, it's a learning experience. He's not college educated, he says, but to him the Clubhouse is like a college education. 'I've learned things from people here. I've learned things from John. John has seizures, I have seizures.' He got his injury falling off a rock at the age of eight while in Korea with his family. His mother is Japanese. Today he has brought in a tray of sushi that she made. He lives in another town North of Cville, on the way to Culpeper. His father brings him in. He used to drive but four years ago he was in a car wreck. He was at a four-way intersection when he had a seizure and lost consciousness. They took his licence away. In the US you have to be clear of seizures for six months or a year or so before they give it you back. He isn't in a hurry to get it. 'I want to drive, but I also don't want to kill anyone.'
Brandon was in a car wreck too. He has a few small scars on his face. His mother died when he was four. She had an insurace policy. When he was eighteen he received a cheque for twenty thousand dollars. He got another cheque for twenty thousand each year until he was twenty five. His father had remarried, he didn't see much of him. 'Because of the kind of people I was hanging out with, I didn't see any of that money.' When he got out of hospital, another cheque was waiting. His friends called him up. He bought the drugs and the money was gone within a month. 'About eighty or eighty-five percent of my life before the injury is gone,' he says. 'The bad part is that all the things I remember are the bad things I did - the things I'd rather I didn't remember.' He's writing a thank you letter to Lisa, the owner of the recording studio he visited last night with Leigh. He wants to work in sound engineering. In the letter he says 'I expect you get a bunch of letters like this, but I think mine is the most sincere on account of my situation.' It's a good letter and I tell him so. He shows me a ring binder he carries with him. Inside are a notepad and 89 pages of computer printed text. I know there are 89 because he tells me. He wrote them in hospital. 'It's explicit,' he says 'there are curse words. A lot of it is poetry.' He says he was angry when he came round in hospital after the accident. He was angry til quite a long time after that. Now he says he's let it go. He's applied for college. He hopes to go back to Lisa's studio to learn more, may be when a band is there recording next time.
Scott was injured at work. He ran a construction company. He had a fall. He's done some work since his injury, but not a lot. This week he's going to drive down to his parents' house in the valley. It's a farmhouse with eight hundred acres, right on the Roanoke river. When he was eighteen he would spend the summers there on his own most years, working with the farm labourer the family employed. He goes down there now pretty regularly, but only in the summers. He goes fishing in the river. The have striped bass up to twenty pounds. He's caught one of fifteen pounds, he says. He holds his hands apart to show me how big. The bass are salt water fish that usually only come into the river's to breed. They got trapped there when they built the dam. Somehow they didn't mind living on in the fresh water and bred and now, if you're lucky and catch a shoal you get a fish on every cast. Some people go out on boats, stunning the fish and extracting their roe for breeding in farms. He doesn't know what happens to the fish, doesn't know how they get the eggs out of them.
Brandon, Wade, Scott.
Jason uses a computer to communicate. It's on an arm attached to his electric wheelchair. It has icons on the screen and a voice that speaks what he types. He also has software that makes the Clubhouse computers easier to use. He enters the data for the member hours and member days into a spreadsheet. He asks me about my relatives. I tell him about my cousins. I tell him they play ultimate frisbee. I say they're quite geeky about it, they have meetings. He laughs. To make sure I get the point he keys the words 'Ha ha ha' into his conole and has the machine speak it out. He's a sports fan but he thinks Ultimate is for losers. He's into baseball. I tell him I'll be sure to pass the message on to James and Oliver.
Leigh emails me to say she has checked the population figures: there are 147,000 living with brain injury in VA. This sounds more like it. I have to check with her about the costing she quoted. I am convinced I remembered it wrong. And what sort of programme was it? Tomorrow I will meet her early to go to Roanoke, where we'll visit the Phoenix Star Clubhouse.
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