That Time My Friend and I Were Denied Housing, Part One

I talked to my friend Tabea the other day. (In this blog, names have been changed to protect the adorable.) We keep in touch regularly even though we no longer live in the same town, and she was telling me about how she went to a museum and ran into difficulties because of her power chair. As you might remember, Tabby is my former college roommate with cerebral palsy who I once walked in on changing. Ah, memories.

Tabby went to a museum and found herself dealing with the usual accessibility problems: the search for non-stair exits, taking elevators that get stuck, drunk people who lean on the back of chair.

“My life was so eventful when we lived together,” I laugh.

“Screw you,” she says, but she’s laughing as well. We both have a shared storehouse of disability horror stories from the time we lived together in a crappy apartment in Central California. If I had to choose our most memorable one, I’d say it was the time we went apartment-hunting.

Not every difficulty was due to people’s reactions to her disability, if I’m being honest. There was the apartment we called the “Haunted Apartment” because it was eerily perfect on paper- two bedrooms for $450 a month, where do you find an apartment like that outside of the 1950’s? -but when I visited it it was fifteen feet from the train tracks. That’s not hyperbole. Then there was the time we decided to walk all across town without any planning- just set out one day and walked til we got to the freeway, it occurring to us too late that we’d have to double back in the end- and stop at random apartments with “Now Renting” or “Check Us Out” signs.

“We got exercise that day.” For some reason I imagined her getting exercise as well.

“Not me,” Tabby corrects me. “I exercised my finger,” she said, referring to her powerchair joystick. It’s the kind of forgetting about her disability that I do, and I can’t decide if it’s from love or stupidity on my part. Tabby chooses to interpret it as deep affection for her unique personhood outside of her disability. “I feel loved,” she beamed that time I took us to a restaurant, and pulled our car up to the parking space and said, “Well, let’s pile out,” while forgetting her chair was dismantled in the backseat.

We hit up at least a dozen apartment management offices that day, and I learned early on to let Tabby speak up ahead of me, or else they tended to speak to me exclusively and ignore her, even when I made it clear the apartment was for both of us.

A woman told me, “I don’t think her cart will fit in our doors.”

‘Cart?’ That was a powerchair- a nice one, even. It is no longer the Dark Ages. The days of pulling your disabled friend along behind you in a rickety wooden cart are gone with the nickel gallon of gas.

But next time, it gets downright illegal.