If you have one arm, the thing you are asked most often, and in a variety of ways, is: "How did you lose your arm?" I have answered this over the years to the best of my ability, and as truthfully as I could.
When I was younger it was pirates; most notably pirates and sharks, conjoined in an arm-chopping-and-feasting operation, which never failed to get an "Ewwwwiiiicchh!" from my audience.
In junior high I used either the old reliable shark, updated to a scuba-diving accident (Pre-Jaws, I remind you; my fantasies have always been precocious), or something in the way of a mountain-climbing accident, with a cauterizing fire, self-administered, started by lightning and fed by pine boughs. Why, growing up in Detroit, I didn't choose a gory automobile accident, I can't tell you; probably too prosaic.
"Why don't you just tell them the Truth?" asked my mom, when she discovered my frenzied alternate-reality scenarios. "I've always been afraid your little friends would think that you simply broke your arm and it had to be removed for some reason; then, if they break their arms, they'll be even more terrified. I'd hate to have that on my conscience."
My mom could find guilt in a sunny day. In my opinion, my "little friends" — a motley crew at best — could fend for themselves. Any terror they had would only be a bonus.
By the time I was in high school, however, the Vietnam war was raging, and more often than not people assumed I was an injured vet; this occurred with greater and greater frequency as I entered college. (It was a long war.)
This, you would think, was a convenience; a war injury was at least as adventurous as sharks or pirates, and had mountain climbing beat all hollow. But there was something about the circumstances — thousands of real veterans having to deal with pain and fear and disability — that made lying about it seem almost ... wrong.
One poor lady even stopped me in a grocery store and asked if I had lost my arm during the Korean War; since I was born in 1949, she was only off by a year.
Anyhoo, by that time, I had discovered that I could collect quite a crowd just by taking off my shirt; in skins-and-shirts basketball games I was the main center of attention; the other players loved that I could make my scar seem to smile or frown just by flexing what would have been my shoulder muscles.
When I got a little older, I discovered Penthouse magazine. The letter columns were full of what was called "amputee sex." It seemed that a significant slice of the male population was queer for women with missing limbs. I eagerly bought issue after issue, but no equivalent lust among the gentler sex was discussed, or even suggested. And it never has been. Sigghh.
Out of college, my pal Stuart Gold introduced me to a young actress, via the phone; she suggested meeting as the local swimming pool. I agreed. "So how will I recognize you?" she asked.
"It won't be difficult. I think I'll be the only guy there with one arm." A rather lengthy pause followed.
"No, really. How will I recognize you?"
"I've only got one arm; the left arm — only one." She giggled.
"Stop trying to be gross. How will I know you?"
"I'm not kidding. Honest. I've just got the one arm." A longer pause.
"Really? You've just got one arm?"
"Uh-huh. You see, when I was born ..."
"Ewwwwwww — YUCK! How gross!!" We did actually go out on the date; it went rather less well than even you're imagining.
Which brings us to the night of the San Diego Con; it was sometime after the big surprise birthday bash for Will Eisner. The ball room was deserted; Mark Wheatly, of Insight Studios, and I were sitting on the floor, with our backs against the wall, contemplating our next move. There was allegedly a party still going on somewhere, and we were debating where it might be found. The occasional tipsy conventioneer would wander by, and either make small talk and speculate about the existence of the party; in short, it was a fairly typical wind-down to a typical SDCon evening; that would soon change.
Milo Savage approached us. He seemed friendly and happy; a bit too happy as it turned out. In those days, Milo Savage was a lucky man; he was working on one of the biggest of the pre- Image comics and was very well-off; it made what followed ever so much more poignant, in that he could have bought and sold the two of us several times over.
Milo sauntered over and knelt beside us.
"Say, Bill... there's something I've been meaning to ask you. I don't mean to be personal, but — "
When people begin that way, it always ends up being about the arm. I think I've heard every opening there is. And I don't care, I really don't. I've been asked since I was a kid, and I figure any way of starting a conversation is a good way. I was already sorting through my explanations, as he worked himself around to his question.
"So I hope you're not too sensitive about this, and I'm just so curious — "
"Milo, it's okay. When I was born, there was a cancerous tumor on my arm. They decided to amputate it when I was 13 days old — "
He waved his hands impatiently.
"No, no, no...! I don't care about any of that shit! What I want to know is — what's the WORST thing about having only one arm?" This stopped me; this was new.
"Milo ..."
"I know there's gotta be something, something that just makes your life a living Hell."
Mark and I stared at each other. I sorted through some of the minor inconveniences I had suffered through over the years.
"Well, it's hard to use a manual can opener, or a manual pencil sharpener. And the handles on drinking fountains are all on the wrong side — "
"Nononono!! Something bad! Something terrible! Something where you wake up at night, wishing you were dead!"
Mark and I once again exchanged looks; I think it was at this moment that we realized just how blasted Milo was.
"Milo," I tried. "Nothing is that bad — really. Most things you do, you do with only one arm, one hand. Think about it: eating, writing, drawing. Some people hardly use their left hands at all."
Milo glowered at me. "If you don't want to tell me, then you should just say so! I thought you were my friend!"
"Milo, we just met."
"And is that why you're feeding me this line of crap?" He was suddenly angry. "I come to you with an honest question, and you won't be straight with me!"
Desperately, I struggled for an answer that would satisfy him.
"Uhh. I wanted to juggle once; it was hard. I'm shitty at golf. When I was eleven I wanted to be a magician, but the magician generally distracts the audience with his other hand; so, unless I kicked a soccer ball into the audience at just the right moment..."
"Jokes! All you tell me is jokes!" He got up and started to pace. "I want to know the WORST moment of your life; the time you finally knew you were a cripple and nothing you ever did and no success you ever had would change that!"
"We are still talking about me, right, Milo?" He stared at me for a minute, then staggered off, muttering.
Mark and I sat in stunned silence.
"Bill made Milo sad," said Mark. "Bill bad." Then we started to giggle.
About a year later, I was invited to a local store signing with Mike Gustovich, Don Simpson and Randy Zimmerman. There was a long table set up in back and we all began to pull out our various art supplies, notebooks, bristol boards and other sketching equipment. 'Dandy' Don shifted thoughtfully to my right side, contemplating a half-finished sketch of Megaton Man.
"Bill can sit by me, because we're both left-handed; we won't get in each other's way," he explained. Randy shifted around us. He was doing a 'Spank the Monkey' sketch.
"Same with me," said Randy. "I'm left-handed, too."
Mike Gustovich looked up from the "Thor Goes to Sesame Street" drawing he was working on. "Gosh-a-rooties," he warbled in the dead perfect Grover accent he affects when he's really surprised. "We're all left-handed."
This created a fifteen-minute stir; Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain had just been published, and we all speculated on whether we were creative because we were left-handed, or the reverse. The coincidence was striking, but since there was no way to prove matters either way, we gradually ran down and commenced to gossip about politics within the various comic companies, and to top each other with horror stories about the son-of-a-bitches we worked for.
It turned out to be a quiet day, after the initial rush; kids came and went; we signed our various books and did our various sketches; finally we looked up and saw there was one kid left. He was regarding us with the slight smirk of the born trouble maker. When you spend the summer gypsying from one signing to the next, you get to size up people pretty quickly.
Fans, especially young fans, try to make their five minutes with you important, even memorable. There are two ways they can do this: by sucking up to you, or by dissing you. Neither one really works, because we've heard so many lines by this time, there ain't many original ones left; it's all a blur of sycophancy and aggression.
But this kid, all ten years of him, didn't know this; he was in our faces immediately, challenging our credentials and snidely questioning our talent. We were inclined to cut him a little slack; after all, we had been fans once; we remembered the demons of desperate hero-worship and insecurity that drove him. Still, it had been a long day.
Finally, he asked Mike Gustovich the question that had been on his mind from the start.
"How do you get into comics?" the kid barked.
Mike tried to explain about endless practice, drawing from life, rather than other comics, reading a lot of things so you'll have a variety of sources to draw from. The Kid was having none of it. He was sure, in that way that only the profoundly ignorant can be, that there was some secret to breaking into the magic circle that only professional cartoonists knew. And we would reveal it if only he would piss us off enough.
"How do you get into comics?" he snarled at Randy Zimmerman.
"You practice, visit editors, get criticism ..." No one believes how small a field this really is. There is really not a lot of room in it for newcomers.
"There's gotta be more to it than that." The kid had finally reached Don Simpson. "How do you get into comics?"
The rest of us held our breath. This was a mistake — Don suffers no fool gladly. He appeared to be considering the question.
"Well, first," said Don. "You got to be left-handed." The Kid stared.
"No way!" he said, but his tone was half-believing; maybe this was the hidden secret.
"Way," said Don, poker-faced. "Everybody in comics is left-handed, the publishers, editors, writers, letterers — everybody."
"Right," said Randy, picking up on it. "And only left-handed people can really draw. Everybody knows that." The Kid's eyes were wide; he had heard something about that. But he was still inclined to be stubborn.
"Naw. You're just lying." His jaw was thrust out, but it was trembling. He, obviously was right-handed.
"It's the truth," said Don Simpson. Having set the hook, he was eager to reel it in. "Everybody in comics is left-handed. Just look — " He gestured the length of the table. We had all been drawing; our brushes were all obviously clenched in our ink-stained left paws. Don lifted his brush in front of the Kid's eyes. "I'm in comics and I'm left-handed."
Next the Kid turned to Randy Zimmerman, who helpfully raised his brush. "And, I'm in comics and I'm left-handed."
Next in line, Mike Gustovich raised his brush and dead-panned, "I'm in comics and I'm left-handed." It was a crushing display of Aristotelian logic. Then, slowly, deliberately, with deadly inevitability, the Kid's eyes, and the eyes of everyone at the table, turned to me, hypnotized. I don't know how far ahead any of us had been planning this, but the words came to me as though from a sage writing hundred of years before. The silence widened, deepened, as the Kid studied me; took in the full impact of my personage.
"And I used to be right-handed," I said, absently flicking my empty sleeve. "But I wanted to be in comics."
There was a piping, high-pitched scream and the Kid was gone, never to return.
I only wished Milo had been there; because while I still didn't know what the worst moment I had ever endured from having one arm, I now knew what the best one was.
