Stronger (19 page)

I know that doesn’t sound like much. I sat in a wheelchair talking with strangers. I threw one pitch,
while sitting down
. I walked four steps. Four!

I know it seems easy. People see me smiling and shaking hands, and they think, it’s not so bad, what Jeff has been through. He seems to enjoy it. I’ve never seen him sad.

It’s not like that. Not at all.

I’m not saying I’m faking it. I’m not. I love seeing the people of Boston, and knowing I’m giving back makes it worth it to be alive. But it takes me hours to get up for an event. There is always crushing doubt. I get depressed. Usually, when I arrive, I feel overwhelmed. I don’t want to get out of the car. Erin or Big D has to talk me into it. Afterward, when the high of the event has passed, I’m so wiped out, physically and emotionally, that I just want to curl into a ball.

First the Red Sox game. Then United Prosthetics, especially United Prosthetics. It was only four steps, I know, but I don’t think I’ve ever been that tired. The last thing I wanted was to spend another evening in a crowd, shaking hands and smiling.

Then I got to the House of Blues and it was… empty. They have an enormous space, and there was almost no one there but a sound guy at his board, and James Taylor’s band noodling with their instruments onstage.

Ellyn, James Taylor’s assistant, met us at the door. She set Erin and me up in the middle of the room, right in front of the board, where the sound was best. The sound guy came over, and we talked for a minute, and then James Taylor came out and started to play. It was difficult to hear clearly at first, because of the holes in my eardrums. The sound echoed in the empty room, and I couldn’t sort out even James Taylor’s mellow notes from the distortions and clanging.

And then he played the opening chords of “You’ve Got a Friend,” and the notes started to make sense with one another, and the echoes started to fade. For the rest of the set, it was just me and Erin, alone in front of the soundboard, with James Taylor singing directly to us. I put my arm around her. She put her head on my shoulder, and I thought of our kids, running around in the future on Popsicle stick legs. This was our first date since the bombing.

After the set, James Taylor came down to sit with us. He chatted with Erin, and then she moved off, and it was just him and me. We talked about my first pitch at the Red Sox game, and about receiving my legs. He asked about my future plans, but I told him I didn’t have any, I was just focusing on walking for now.

He told me about his life, about not making it in New York and then moving to London, where he auditioned for George Harrison and Paul McCartney, who were thinking about signing him to their record label.

“I hear you’re a guitar player,” he said.

“I can play a few chords.”

He went to the stage and came back with one of his guitars, a Yamaha Acoustic. It was the same guitar I had bought for myself that Christmas, only six months ago, but it felt like a lifetime ago now.

I was worried. I thought he was going to ask me to play with him, and the way my ears were buzzing, I wasn’t going to be able to hear the notes.

Instead, he pulled out a marker and wrote on it:
Jeff: Carry on… James Taylor
.

“Thanks,” I said, as he handed me the guitar. We talked about playing on the porch on a nice summer day, and about how fun it was to jam with our brothers. James’s brother Livingston taught at the Berklee College of Music in Boston and was a sick guitarist himself.

He asked about my medical expenses. I told him I had good insurance, but beyond that I didn’t know, nobody had shown me any bills. Mom was taking care of that for me, through an irrevocable trust Uncle Bob had helped set up in my name. Nobody could get money from the trust, even me, without clearing it with the executors.

“I bet you get a lot of donations,” he said.

I looked at the ground. The topic made me uncomfortable. “Yeah, I get a lot,” I said. “I’m getting money all the time.” I rubbed my thighs, my new nervous habit. “I guess I’m going to need it.”

“Don’t feel bad about it, Jeff,” he said. “Just sit back and let people help you. It makes them feel good.”

I didn’t understand. I still don’t understand, not really.

“Yes, sir,” I said.

James Taylor laughed. “No need to call me sir.”

He invited me to the sound check at the TD Garden the next morning. I asked if I could bring Mom. He said sure, but Mom backed out at the last minute, and Erin had to work, so only Kevin and I got to hear the bands warming up. Musicians and crew kept coming over to us, saying hello, and chatting. Carole King joined James Taylor onstage for “You’ve Got a Friend.” When they got to the chorus, James Taylor smiled and pointed at Kevin and me.

“I guess this will have to be our song,” Kevin said.

I laughed. “Sure, Kevy,” I said. “Sure.”

After his set, James Taylor came over again. He pulled up a chair to sit beside me. He was walking with a cane—maybe he’d had some surgery, I’m not sure. We chatted for a minute, and then someone said loudly, “Move over, James.” James Taylor started to move over, but the chairs were spring-loaded, like in a movie theater, and something happened, and before I knew it, he was down on the floor.

“James,” the guy yelled, taking his seat. “What happened, James! What are you doing down there?”

It was Jimmy Buffett.

He helped James Taylor back into his chair, made sure he was all right, and then turned back to me. “Can you believe I’m missing fishing in the Bahamas for this?” he said with a smile.

I could see it then: two personalities. Two guys trying to be there for me, each in his own way. They were just different. James Taylor… he was like having a dad. One who comes home after work, takes an interest, asks how you’ve been.

Jimmy Buffett was like my uncle Bob.

I don’t remember much about the concert. They gave about a hundred bombing victims chairs in front of the barriers, so we had in-front-of-the-front-row seats. Erin and both of our moms sat with me. We were too close to the speakers for my ears, so I spent much of the show watching musicians blast away into a sonic fog. After the concert, we went backstage. We met some of the performers, who were generous with their time. We laughed and chatted, and then James Taylor invited my family back to his dressing room, where we hung out for another half hour or so.

By the time I left, the arena was empty, and even Erin and Mom had gone back to the hotel. The Colonnade Hotel, one of the nicest in Boston, had given us free rooms for the night so we wouldn’t have to travel back to Chelmsford. Kevin offered to drive me over, so we ended up down in the bowels of the arena with the roadies and Teamsters, winding through passageways, trying to figure out how to get to his car.

Eventually, we passed this heavy dude hanging out by the loading dock. He looked like Silent Bob from the Kevin Smith movies: black clothes, long hair, hat turned backward. “Hey, Jeff, how’s it going, man?”

“Good,” I said, stopping to shake his hand. I tried to shake everyone’s hand I could.

“Did you really see the bomber?” he said.

“I did.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I looked right at him.”

“Well, I was reading on the Internet, and there are a lot of inconsistencies in the story. There are a lot of things that just don’t make sense…”

“We’re out of here,” Kevin said. He grabbed my wheelchair and started wheeling me quickly through the tunnels.

The guy ran after us, talking about how the bombing was fake, how it was all a government plot.

Kevin was pissed. He’s a nice guy; this was the first time I’d seen him ready to punch somebody in the face. Eventually, the guy stopped following us, and we made it to the car. But Kevin couldn’t stop thinking about it. I don’t think he said two words on the drive.

Kevin was protective of me. Maybe too protective. He was unhappy with the AP photo of me in the wheelchair. He thought it was an invasion of my privacy, although he later admitted, “It turned out to be a good thing. It gave you the opportunity to prove that wasn’t the end of your story.”

He thought the conspiracy theories were insulting. That they diminished me and my suffering. I can see that. I got blown up. I lost my legs. I’ve gone through hell, and so has my family. When people say it’s fake, they dismiss our pain. They dump on everything we’ve done to stick together and find joy in life.

It doesn’t bother me, though. Why should it? I understand there is a group of people who think I am an actor, born without legs. That I’m a fake victim of a fake bombing. Why would I do that? I’m not sure. I don’t know if they think every victim is a fake, or if all the spectators on that block were fake, or if they think the marathon itself was fake.

I don’t want to know. Worrying about conspiracy theories would be like hating the bombers, or obsessively thinking about how things could have gone differently. I don’t have time for it. I need my strength. I need to look forward. I can’t waste my energy on losers.

As James Taylor sang at the concert, and he pointed right at me when he sang it: “They’ll take your soul if you let them, ah, but don’t you let them.”

The funny thing is, I’m sympathetic to their thinking, at least a bit. The government can’t be trusted. They lied about nuclear weapons in Iraq. They kidnap people. They eavesdrop on our conversations. We know these for facts. They even lied about the eavesdropping, on national television, at the exact moment they were doing it to millions of people. They are too big to be punished, and there’s nothing we can do about it.

But fake a bombing? At a famous, crowded public event? In a major city in the middle of the day, with thousands of cameras around?

That’s stupid.

And it hurts people. It really does. I’m not on the Internet, so I’m not too affected by it, but the reason I’m not on the Internet is because of the conspiracies. (If you Google my name, the first choice is “Jeff Bauman fake.”) I don’t answer my phone for numbers I don’t know, and I keep my voice mail full so strangers can’t leave messages. Erin shut down her Facebook page because she didn’t want to read the messages. She has said, at least twice, that she hates the conspiracy theorists more than the bombers.

“The bombers didn’t target us,” Erin says. “You just happened to be there. But the conspiracy people are trying to ruin our lives. They are terrorizing us, for no purpose, for some stupid hobby.”

She doesn’t mean it—at least not the part about the “truthers” being worse than the bombers. There’s so much anger and frustration, no matter how much we try to stay positive. It comes out in unexpected ways.

It’s hardest, I think, for Aunt Jenn. She runs my Facebook page, along with several volunteers, all strangers. She also moderates it, so she hears from the conspiracy nuts. People say terrible things about her and about me. They aren’t just dismissing our pain and suffering; they hate us because they think we’re government operatives. I tell her to ignore the accusations and threats, but she gets emotional. For a while, she had to stop updating the page, because one person was aggressively attacking her, insisting she talk with him. She couldn’t sleep, and she felt unsafe.

“Our family has suffered so much,” she said. “Why are they doing this?”

I laughed. “Saying that is just going to make them hate you more, Aunt Jenn.”

I have no doubt writing this book will feed the conspiracy. There are all kinds of hidden messages in here, right? Of course! Once someone believes something like that, there’s no convincing them otherwise.

It’s almost funny.

Except for one thing: Tamerlan Tsarnaev was inspired by conspiracy theories. He believed that 9/11 was an American government plot to frame Muslims, and that lie was so central to his life that he reportedly convinced his own mother it was true. I don’t know if the conspiracy started him down the path to murderous hate, or if it was simply a key step in his decline. I think he was a sociopath looking for a reason. But even if 9/11 “truthing” was just an excuse, it wasn’t harmless. It was poison.

The day after the concert, Aunt Jenn threw her annual summer party in her big backyard. She lives along a major road in an older house that her husband, Uncle Dale, had owned for decades. A new suburban neighborhood had been built behind it, but their property was grandfathered, so Dale can still park his dump trucks in the back. The yard is so big, you can barely see the trucks behind the pool.