Free Crashing Through by Robert Kurson Page A

he have any moves? At the movies once during high school, he’d clumsily reached for a girl’s hand and had been rebuffed—how was he supposed to start reaching beyond that now? May sensed that Nancy was equally inexperienced. He put his arm around her and onto her hair, and pulled close to kiss her. She moved into his touch. The feeling of connection and softness was overwhelming, and there was no turning back. But how was he supposed to proceed? The Barbie dolls that had been his teachers were smoothed over in the places he needed to go. He had never enjoyed the gift of learning that stag films conferred upon his friends. He had believed things would be obvious when this moment came, but as he and Nancy fumbled with each other’s clothes and made noises that seemed to sound right, the helping arms of the gods remained folded. May searched for important parts he’d learned about from
Playboy
and pals, asking himself, “Is this it? Is that it? How will I know when I get there?” After the night wound down and May had gotten there, he told himself, “This is a new and wonderful world.”
    The couple dated through the summer and promised to keep in touch even as they attended colleges hours apart. May registered at UC-Davis—the only blind student in a body of sixteen thousand. The school, however, did not offer Santa Cruz–style courses in stories and feelings. Its administrators wanted their engineering majors learning calculus and physics and chemistry.
    May struggled from the start. The technical nature of his curriculum—including its heavy reliance on graphics—began to drown him. It did not help that he spent five hours a day training as a member of the collegiate wrestling team. He barely squeaked by. After a time he found new tutors and discovered calculus texts written in braille. He hung on.
    Though May learned to get by in classes, he still stumbled in his quest for romance. Traveling in engineering circles did not situate him among the university’s coed elite, and when he did speak to women his patter was patchwork. At dorm-sponsored dances, he forced himself to approach females, but the blaring music and wall-to-wall crowds frequently sent him off course. Often, when aiming for a beautiful woman his friends had located, he found himself asking a football player or even a wall to dance. One guy asked him, “Are you stoned?” because his eyes looked different. “He wouldn’t dance with me,” May joked to his friends.
    School got tougher sophomore year. May’s classes were more advanced, and the wrestling team swallowed more of his time. At Christmas, nearly gaunt from training, he announced to his brother Patrick that he was going to wrestle one of the Donaldson twins at an AAU tournament.
    “Not the Donaldson twins!” Patrick exclaimed. “They’re famous! They’re animals! They pin their opponents in, like, five seconds. Whichever one it is, he’ll kill you!”
    May wrestled anyway. He refused to be pinned—that was everything to him. But the twin beat him up badly. After the match, May knew he was done wrestling. He hadn’t enjoyed a Thanksgiving meal in years because of his dieting regimen, and he had no time to study. The decision came as a great relief. By the new year he’d put some meat on his bones and stood a fighting chance in the classroom.
    Liberated, May bounced through campus, guiltlessly hitting favorite haunts like A. J. Bump’s, Vic’s Ice Cream, and especially the Giant Hamburger, where he ordered burgers with everything and bought entire fruit pies when they were on sale. His appetite to go places sometimes delivered him into the no-man’s-lands of Davis. All it took was a bad shortcut across a field or the wrong tong in a forked pathway and he could be lost for hours. Sometimes he would arrive at places he hadn’t expected, cross paths with interesting people, stumble upon some feature of the landscape or trinket shop or ball field that he’d never dreamed was