Chip Jacobs •• Wheeling the Deal

This excerpt is from Chapter 12 of
Wheeling the Deal: The Outrageous Legend of Gordon Zahler, Hollywood's Flashiest Quadriplegic.

Behler Publications. Copyright Chip Jacobs.

This was making it. Buying trips to London and New York. Ed Wood doubling what he paid last time. A music deal for 195 Crusader Rabbit cartoons. Watching secretaries who’d once fabricated excuses why their boss wasn’t in welcome him with a supple, “Good morning, Mr. Zahler. We’ve been expecting you.”

It was all good, all bizarre evolution, but he was working such long hours overseeing the edits and stocking new music that he sometimes broke into unexplained sweats or felt weak by eleven a.m. Gordon’s head whirled in business twenty hours a day and his body suffered. Rose badgered him to be careful. “You’re going to work yourself back into intensive care if you don’t take it easy,” she would say on the drive home to Shoreham Drive. CPA Jack had his own opinion. The TV-shooting season was over, he said. Take a little vacation.

Tell that to the quiver at the base of Gordon’s skull. Be content you’re making money, the quiver lectured in tight situations. Stare in the mirror if you get antsy for more. Why shouldn’t he look? Existing above the neck, Gordon felt severed from the thrills that were once his stipulated daily requirement. No mischief, no speed, no double-dares, no girls. Paralysis demented him with boredom. Others were in charge of his every damned wish. By the time they fulfilled it, the new items he thought of were already green with mold. About the only action he enjoyed was traveling, which he couldn’t do enough, and pitching ideas.

Too often, watching the blood drain out of people’s faces when they caught site of him for the first time constituted the dramatic part of his day. Then he’d have to calm them down by acting casual. If that failed, he found it helpful to repeat stories about his wild childhood—old stink bomb attacks or riding bikes off roofs. Their knowing he hadn’t always been a quadriplegic seemed to offset their shock, though it didn’t quell the twitch inside them they were one bone-crushing fall away from being him.

As if the comforting did him much good. Twenty years of sponge bathing had pancaked expectations. In that time, there had been two thrill rides and one genuinely interested woman. The club hopping—that was adolescent stuff. Now that he was in Hollywood, around soundstage gunfights and peroxide sex kittens, he saw how frustrating it was to be numb in a touch-me town.

He wanted to cavort. The Sunset Strip was right there. He only needed a shove. My grandma said she was baffled. Why, she asked, couldn’t he be content with what he had accomplished? Everybody was so proud. “Remember the article (that called him a genius)?” Because, he said, that wasn’t enough. Watching Milton Berle on TV in his new house after work left his juices cold. She reminded him of the fun he had at that costume party, when a friend had dressed him up as Whistler’s Mother and he took first prize. “Couldn’t you be satisfied going to a party once a month?” He looked up at the ceiling, disgusted. “Mom, you haven’t figured it out, have you? We both know I’m never getting up. But getting cheated when there’s a lot I can do? If you want to know the truth, I’d rather be dead.”

Neither of them plied the subject further. In the silence, Rose thought about what that physician who had given him a checkup a month ago had predicted. She had called Dr. Risser at home for a second opinion that night when Gordon sacked out early. Was it true, she had asked? That he couldn’t possibly live another five years as the other doctor had told her privately? Depends on him, Risser had responded. He had never heard of anybody with a cervical injury like Gordon’s who made it past thirty-five. An orthopedic journal had already published a story on how surprising it was he’d lasted.
Ultimately, it was Rose’s mother, the fat, folksy Dearie Rossman, who bestowed on Gordon the adage he had been waiting to hear. The occasion was the party for his thirty-third birthday, and most of the guests had surrounded the coffee urn in the kitchen. While they were away, Dearie leaned in close and whispered to him what she told her neurotic pet dachshund. “Don’t strain yourself. You’re here for pleasure.”

Pleasure. Early one Friday evening, a month after his birthday, Gordon sat alone in the rear seat of a Chrysler ragtop gunning along Interstate 10. He was being driven to Palm Springs, a desert playground 100 miles east of L.A. Samuel Bronston Jr., the son of one of Gordon’s independent-producer-friends, was behind the wheel. His actress-girlfriend was nuzzled up close to him on the front seat. It was to be a relaxing weekend of poolside card games and indulgent, four-drink dinners. They had the radio turned up and Sam let everyone pull swigs from his silver flask. Anybody mentioning business got the evil eye.

Sam Jr., however, was more interested stealing looks down his girlfriend’s blouse than concentrating on the one-lane road. He never saw that rut in the highway, the one about the width of a pizza box. Twenty miles out of Palm Springs, the Chrysler’s left front wheel clunked into the hole and the car veered violently off course. The rut sent it skidding right toward the highway shoulder wholly out of control. Despite’s Sam feeble attempt to brake, the car plowed into a dirt mound at about twenty-five mph. The next sensation was after the crash, when both Sam and his girlfriend felt the pinch of whiplash in their necks. Here was the other shocker: Gordon was missing from the back seat.

Night was coming. So was the weekend traffic. Sam Jr. flashed ahead to what he might be facing—manslaughter charges, his father’s wrath. This was supposed to be kicks. So many disastrous events start that way. “Gor-don,” he hollered. “Where are you? Gordon-don. Where in the name of Christ could you be?”

To be specific, seventeen-and-one-quarter feet up the highway. Gordon, as he would tell and retell in vivid reconstructions, wasn’t in the backseat because he’d been launched out of it. Sir Isaac Newton could explain it: a body in motion tends to stay in motion. The moment the car slammed into the embankment, there was nothing restraining Gordon, certainly not any car seatbelt, which wasn’t standard then, or his own scrawny body mass.

He was jettisoned, catapulted like flaming ammo during the Crusades, probably a foot over the door-lock if he had to wager. Along the way, he blacked out. He remembered nothing about being airborne or the landing. His memory reset when a car close to where he landed tore by. That was because he saw it from the tires up and assumed he was dead.
Actually, lying face down on the asphalt he was sure he was dead. He wasn’t just on the asphalt—he was just outside the narrow, white line separating forty mph oncoming traffic from the shoulder. The light wasn’t terrific for motorists, either. Twilight speckled the desert in amber hues and deceiving shadows. Pointed northwest, Gordon could see what was coming towards him. And a large set of headlights, possibly from a big rig a half-mile away, was coming. Whatever it was, the headlights shone a lot brighter now.
“Help,” he called out.

“But where are you?” Sam whimpered. “Jesus. I killed Gordon. I can’t believe it. I fucking killed him.”

The headlights wound around a little bend and then caught Gordon 150 yards away.

“Over here!” Gordon shrieked, his voice cracking on the vowels. “I’m over here. Near the white line. And hurry up. I’m begging ya.”

Sam ran over and scooped him up in his arms. His passenger was royally peeved. “Nice driving, Sam,” Gordon said. “Five more inches over the line and a car would’ve squished my head like a grapefruit.”

The marvel was that he hadn’t shattered his fused spine on impact and died like road kill. Incredibly, his neck was undamaged. His face was okay, too, if you excluded the purple knot engorging out of his left temple. It wasn’t until Sam laid him in the car that Gordon said he was feeling lousy. He was nauseous, and it had something to do with his arm. It’d spasmed. Sam said hold on. He backed the Chrysler out and floored it east on Route 10. This time his girlfriend sat in the rear with Gordon.

At Torney General Hospital near Palm Springs, Gordon suspected his arm was fractured and said so. The E.R. doctor, a freckled young man not long out of medical school, was skeptical a quad could detect limb damage. His hunch was that the patient was woozy from a minor concussion. “Just grab my elbow and pull up if you don’t believe me,” my uncle countered. Ignoring him, the doctor asked the male attendant to assist him removing Gordon’s sweater because it kept getting snagged along one of the sleeves. It came off, and his shirt was bloody along one inseam.

Seeing what lay underneath, people in the room felt their bile surge up, everybody that is but Gordon, who was accustomed to medical drama. This was a new one. The bone in his upper-right arm had snapped cleanly in two with a compound fracture. The end closest to his elbow had punctured the skin like a twig poking through snow. Inside, viscous, yellow bone marrow oozed around the blood. Suddenly there was a dull thunk behind the examining table. Gordon asked Sam what happened and Sam said the attendant had taken one peek at the bone and fainted off in the corner. The doctor apologized for the incident and then shipped Gordon up to surgery.

A couple days later at work, wearing a sling over his arm cast, Gordon told Nat that Palm Springs could wait. He had come up with something even better. A speedboat—that’s what he needed.

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