If, like me, you acquired your disability while living your everyday life, you can look back and always remember that unforgettable date — the day you were injured or struck down or diagnosed. Many of us know our stories so well that whenever someone wants to know what happened to us, we trot out this well-rehearsed version, which seldom varies. Lately, though, since I am a writer — and since tragic stories make for interesting tale-telling — I find myself embellishing my story to make it more engaging.
I first noticed what an effective tool fictionally enhanced memory can be (sounds more respectable than “lying out your ass”) when someone I had known for several years took it upon himself to explain to a new acquaintance of mine how I came to be paralyzed. The true story is quite simple: One summer day I crashed in a small plane, broke my back and damaged my spinal cord, and an ambulance came right away and took me to a nearby hospital.
My friend’s version sounded much more dramatic: He crashed on a mountain in a small plane that caught fire in the dead of winter. Amazingly, he survived but lay unconscious in the wreckage of the plane for a week, buried in the snow with wolves circling, before an airplane spotted the wreckage. Miraculously, he was able to be evacuated by helicopter, still in a coma, and woke up several weeks later in the ICU. But here he is now, as good as new, smoking pot with the rest of us.
I liked my friend’s version much better than the one I had memorized, and I figured it might even be marketable. So I decided to write a screenplay. Right away I ran into a major obstacle: I wanted to include “Based on a True Story” on the title page, but the word “true” kept getting in the way. So, to assuage my guilt, I created a mostly true version, but found I could not stop adding in fictional details. First off, I worked on my protagonist’s body: I kept the scars on my forehead but took off about 20 pounds of fat and added 10 pounds of muscle. I changed my hair to a darker color, thickened it, and increased my IQ substantially.
Then I grew my back story: I became, in my former life, an incredible athlete who was about to sign with the Dodgers at the time of the crash. Oh, and instead of having a high school girlfriend who stuck with me until I crashed at age 20 but then abandoned me, I dumped her on graduation night, went on to conquer dozens of blonde sorority girls and shacked up with a super hot surfer girl with long dark hair and tan bulging breasts in a black bikini.
Then, tragically, I crashed.
You see, I kept the true part, but milked all the supporting details. Now when someone asks me what happened, I ask them: Do you want true, mostly true, or the 60-second movie trailer?
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