The Moth (35 page)

It’s a mess.

But then a few years later, my prosthetist tells me, “Aimee, we got waterproof legs for you. No more rusty bolts!”

This is a revelation, right? This is gonna change my life. I was so excited to get these legs… until I saw them.

They were made of polypropylene, which is that white plastic “milk jug” material. And when I say “white,” I’m not talking about skin color; I’m talking about
the color white
. The “skin color” was the rubber foam foot painted “Caucasian,” which is the nastiest shade of nuclear peach that you’ve ever seen in your life. It has nothing to do with any human skin tone on the planet. And these legs were so good at being waterproof that they were
buoyant
. So when I’d go off the high dive, I’d go down and come straight back up feet first. They were the bane of my existence.

But then we’re at the Jersey Shore one summer. By the time we get there, there’s three hundred yards of towels between me and the sea. And I know this is where I first honed my ability to run really fast. I was the white flash. I didn’t wanna feel hundreds of pairs of eyes staring at me. And so I’d get myself into the ocean, and I was a good swimmer, but no amount of swimming technique can control buoyant legs.

So at some point I get caught in a rip current, and I’m migrating from my vantage point of where I could see my parents’ towel. And I’m taking in water, and I’m fighting, fighting, fighting. And all I could think to do was pop off these legs and put one under each armpit, with the peach feet sticking up, and just bob, thinking,
Someone’s gotta find me.

And a lifeguard did. And I’m sure he will collect for therapy bills. You know? Like, they don’t show that on
Baywatch
.

But they saved my life, those legs.

And then when I was fourteen it was Easter Sunday, and I was gonna be wearing a dress that I had purchased with my own money—the first thing I ever bought that wasn’t on sale.
Momentous event; you never forget it. I’d had a paper route since I was twelve, and I went to The Limited, and I bought this dress that I thought was the height of sophistication—sleeveless safari dress, belted, hits at the knee.

Coming downstairs into the living room, I see my father waiting to take us to church. He takes one look at me, and he says, “That doesn’t look right. Go upstairs and change.”

I was like, “What? My super-classy dress? What are you talking about? It’s the best thing I own.”

He said, “No, you can see the knee joint when you walk. It doesn’t look right. It’s inappropriate to go out like that. Go change.”

And I think something snapped in me. I refused to change. And it was the first time I defied my father. I refused to hide something about myself that was true, and I refused to be embarrassed about something so that other people could feel more comfortable.

I was grounded for that defiance.

So after church the extended family convenes at my grandmother’s house, and everybody’s complimenting me on how nice I look in this dress, and I’m like, “Really? You think I look nice? Because my parents think I look inappropriate.”

I outed them (kinda mean, really).

But I think the public utterance of this idea that I should somehow hide myself was so shocking to hear that it changed their mind about why they were doing it.

And I had always managed to get through life with somewhat of a positive attitude, but I think this was the start of me being able to accept myself. You know, okay, I’m not normal. I have strengths. I’ve got weaknesses. It is what it is.

And I had always been athletic, but it wasn’t until college
that I started this adventure in Track and Field. I had gone through a lifetime of being given legs that just barely got me by. And I thought,
Well, maybe I’m just having the wrong conversations with the wrong people. Maybe I need to go find people who say, “Yes, we can create
anything
for you in the space between where your leg ends and the ground.”

And so I started working with engineers, fashion designers, sculptors, Hollywood prosthetic makeup artists, wax museum designers to build legs for me.

I decided I wanted to be the fastest woman in the world on artificial legs, and I was lucky enough to arrive in track at just the right time to be the first person to get these radical sprinting legs modeled after the hind leg of a cheetah, the fastest thing that runs—woven carbon fiber. I was able to set three world records with those legs. And they made no attempt at approximating humanness.

Then I get these incredibly lifelike silicon legs—hand-painted, capillaries, veins. And, hey, I can be as tall as I wanna be, so I get different legs for different heights. I don’t have to shave. I can wear open-toed shoes in the winter. And most importantly, I can opt out of the cankles I most certainly would’ve inherited genetically.

And then I get these legs made for me by the late, great Alexander McQueen, and they were hand-carved of solid ash with grapevines and magnolias all over them and a six-inch heel. And I was able to walk the runways of the world with supermodels. I was suddenly in this whirlwind of adventure and excitement. I was being invited to go around the world and speak about these adventures, and how I had legs that looked like glass, legs covered in feathers, porcelain legs, jellyfish legs—all wearable sculpture.

And I get this call from a guy who had seen me speak years ago, when I was at the beginning of my track career, and he says, “We loved it. We want you to come back.” And it was clear to me he didn’t know all these amazing things that had happened to me since my sports career.

So as I’m telling him, he says, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Hold on, Aimee. The reason everybody liked you all those years ago was because you were this sweet, vulnerable, naïve girl, and if you walk onstage today, and you are this polished young woman with too many accomplishments, I’m afraid they won’t like you.”

For real, he said that. Wow.

He apparently didn’t think I was vulnerable enough now. He was asking me to be
less than
, a little more downtrodden. He was asking me to disable myself for him and his audience.

And what was so shocking to me about that was that I realized I had moved past mere acceptance of my difference. I was having
fun
with my difference. Thank
God
I’m not normal. I get to be
extraordinary
. And I’ll decide what is a weakness and what is a strength.

And so I refused his request.

And a few days later, I’m walking in downtown Manhattan at a street fair, and I get this tug on my shirt, and I look down. It’s this little girl I met a year earlier when she was at a pivotal moment in her life. She had been born with a brittle bone disease that resulted in her left leg being seven centimeters shorter than her right. She wore a brace and orthopedic shoes and they got her by, but she wanted to do more.

And like all Internet-savvy kindergarteners, she gets on the computer and Googles “new leg,” and she comes up with dozens of images of prosthetics, many of them mine. And she
prints them out, goes to school, does show-and-tell on it, comes home, and makes a startling pronouncement to her parents:

“I wanna get rid of my bad leg,” she says. “When can I get a new leg?”

And ultimately that was the decision her parents and doctors made for her. So here she was, six months after the amputation, and right there in the middle of the street fair she hikes up her jeans leg to show me her cool new leg. And it’s pink, and it’s tattooed with the characters of
High School Musical 3
, replete with red, sequined Mary Janes on her feet.

And she was proud of it. She was proud of herself. And the marvelous thing was that this six-year-old understood something that it took me twenty-something years to get, but that we both did discover—that when we can celebrate and truly own what it is that makes us different, we’re able to find the source of our greatest creative power.

Aimee Mullins
has built a career as an athlete, model, actor, and advocate for women, sports, and the next generation of prosthetics. Mullins was born without fibular bones and had both of her legs amputated below the knee when she was an infant. She learned to walk on prosthetics, then to run—competing at national and international levels as a champion sprinter, setting world rec ords at the 1996 Paralympics in Atlanta. In 1999, Aimee made her runway debut in London at the invitation of Alexander McQueen. She’s a passionate voice heralding a new kind of thinking about bodies and identities. Aimee also has received accolades for her work as an actor, debuting in the art epic
Cremaster 3
. She is currently starring as Isis in Matthew Barney’s
Ancient Evenings
project, an adaptation of the novel by Norman Mailer.

NATHAN ENGLANDER

F
or those of you who are less than a hundred years old, I want to tell you there used to be something called the Soviet Union. They were our archenemy, and we were locked in a perpetual state of Cold War with them until I was an adult.

To contrast that to the perpetual War on Terror that we’re in now—where going around the city, we’re all afraid
something
’s going to blow up. Back then, we were afraid
everything
was going to blow up. We were going to melt the whole world into a tiny glass marble.

The symbol of the split between East and West was the Berlin Wall, which not only divided that city, it divided the planet. People would die trying to cross. They were literally trapped, and they would dream of freedom, and they would hide in trunks of cars or try to dig under or hang glide over. And they would be shot dead. That’s how serious it was.

So in 1989, I’m on my junior year in Jerusalem, studying abroad, and suddenly word comes out of nowhere that the wall has been breached. It’s open. There’s a crossing between East and West. People can move freely between. And it’s not like
today, where Halliburton would, for a hundred million dollars, pull the thing down. People are literally ripping it down with their bare hands, with hammers and chisels. This is just unbelievable.

The only thing I can think of, in terms of today, is if I announced right now onstage that there’s peace in the Middle East, and you can take an Al Qaeda bus tour of Kabul—you know, go see Osama bin Laden’s coffee shop.

It was
mind-boggling
.

Within two seconds people start showing up in Jerusalem with pieces of the wall. They’re going over there and chipping at it. They’re helping put the world back together. They’re a part of history.

And this girl I have a crush on shows up, and she gives me a piece of the wall. It’s got graffiti on it. I’m holding it, and it’s like holding moon rock. I mean, I’m holding it! I just can’t believe I’m holding it. It’s such an amazing thing to be a part of.

Except I
ain’t
.

It’s clear to me in an instant. I need to go be a part of this. So I grab my buddy Joel, who dragged me to Jerusalem, and we set the plan in order. We’re gonna do it Jewish-boy style. We’re going to do a sort of Passover slavery-to-freedom route. So we fly into Warsaw, and we do Auschwitz, Majdanek, Treblinka. We hit all our favorite concentration camps. And we end up in Prague, where we’re going to take a night train to Berlin. That’s the end of this heroic journey for us. We’re going to get to Berlin in the morning, chip at the wall, cross to the West, and go back home.

Well, we thought this was a grand plan. But nobody else seems to have thought so, ’cause we are alone on this platform at night. It is pitch-dark, and there’s nobody else there. But here
comes our train. At least we think it’s our train. It starts rolling through the station, but it doesn’t stop. It just keeps rolling. And what it is is an old freight train.

Now, I grew up religious on Long Island. I had been raised on a full-on diet of the Holocaust. And this instantly sets off the Holocaust PTSD in my head. You know what I’m saying?

I’m a Yeshiva boy. We didn’t do
The Diary of Anne Frank
. We went
Clockwork Orange
–style. From a way too young age, they would sit us down and play tapes that flashed images—big black jackboots and piles of bodies, teeth, hair—just these really unbelievably dark images.

And there’s no greater symbol of the Holocaust than the trains. I mean, these are the trains that annihilated our people. They would stuff them full of Jews, and when there was no more room, they would stuff babies in over the people’s heads.

And there we are, standing on the same platform. It’s not like it’s changed. We’re on
the same platform
. These are the
same tracks
. This could be the same train that took our people to their destruction. And we’re standing there, dead silent. But the next train is our train, and we get on it.

And back to growing up on Long Island, I know trains. And I know when something doesn’t feel right. And I step into the train car, and this feels bad. It’s too hot and already overpacked. We’re looking for our seats, and we go over to our assigned compartment, and we open it, and we expect, like, two British people drinking tea. But instead the beds are open, and it’s six guys laid out head to toe like sardines. And honestly, it smells of piss. It smells of beer. And most of all, it just smells of sadness. These are refugees. Joel and I are on some sort of freedom adventure, but these people have been trapped behind the Iron Curtain, and the wall has come down, and these are refugees
on the move. We don’t want our seats anymore, and they ain’t giving ’em up. So we look around in the packed car, and this nice family makes room for us. We take off our backpacks, and they slide their kids over, and they let us in their compartment. And I could cry telling this to you right now: these people with nothing, they offered to share their food with us. We settle in. And we’re rolling. We’re on our way to Berlin.

And then the train stops. And we hear voices yelling.

I don’t speak the language, and I don’t know what’s happening, what’s getting screamed. But suddenly,
bedlam
! The family is grabbing their stuff. Everybody has to get off the train.