Emile Barrios

If you’re familiar with the film Fight Club, you know that the First Rule of Fight Club is, “You do not talk about Fight Club.” That’s the Second Rule as well. Tyler Durden was very clear about that. (If you haven’t seen Fight Club, I highly recommend it.)

I belonged to a different club: Prosthetic Club. I’ve strapped a prosthetic limb to my leg every day since I could walk. And the First Rule of Prosthetic Club was always: “You do not talk about wearing a prosthetic.” I made up that rule when I was still in elementary school, and I followed it zealously. The last thing I wanted to do was to call attention to the thing that made me different from the rest of the world. Tyler would have been proud.

Somewhere over the years, the prosthetic morphed from being something I didn’t talk about into a shameful secret I was desperate to protect. The membership in Prosthetic Club, I realized, was limited to me and me alone. I could only survive in the “normal” world by keeping my secret safe, because obviously if people knew about it they would reject me as a repulsive cripple. Being the smart guy I was, I figured this out all on my own – there was no one I could ask about it, and anyway talking would violate the First Rule.

Hiding this secret took a lot of effort, and soon I developed some serious drug and alcohol problems in order to keep a lid on things. Later, I got sober and began looking at and addressing some of the deep-seated issues I had about being born with a disability and how I saw the world through the lens of that disability. Little by little, I started to change my attitude about it, and I thought about it less. But the legacy of Prosthetic Club lived on. It never occurred to me that at some point I would actually feel comfortable talking about my missing hand and foot or the prosthetic. That just seemed like something so far beyond the limits of possibility that it wasn’t worth trying for. I just kept working at changing my attitude.
Fast forward about 15 years, and I’m visiting Sam and Grace, a couple of old friends back in my home town. We’re talking about my getting back on a plane the next day, and I mention to them that I now have to take off my prosthesis in the security line, put in through the x-ray scanner, and strap it back on once I’ve gone through the metal detector. Very inconvenient, I say.

“I never knew you wore a prosthetic,” Grace says to me. No surprise there, I think.

Suddenly Ricky, their precocious eight-year old, comes running in from he next room.

“You wear a prosthetic limb?” he asks.

“I sure do,” I say.

“Can I see it?”

Sam and Grace protest, but I don’t mind. I nod and pull up my pants leg.

“Can you take it off?”

“Absolutely,” I say. I take off my shoe and sock, unstrap the Velcro, and hand it to him.

He takes it from my hand, wide-eyed.

“Wow!”  He looks at it for a moment, and then turns to me with a big and mischievous smile.

“Can I take this upstairs and scare my sister with it?”

I roar with laughter.

“Go ahead,” I said. 

Ricky straps it on so that it looks like he has an extra leg. Dragging it like Igor in Dr. Frankenstein’s lab, he goes upstairs, barely able to contain his glee. In a few seconds we heard a gasp from his teenage sister Carrie, and then both kids run down the stairs, laughing. None of them even guess at the significance of this moment; and I am completely unprepared for how comfortable I feel. Something very deep inside me has changed.

We stand there for a long time, the five of us in the kitchen, with Ricky holding the prosthetic and all of us laughing at this delightful and unexpected episode. 

The final meeting of Prosthetic Club had just been adjourned.