Meeting Joe McTigue
I was a bit sweaty from walking nearly a mile to the taco joint on the West-Side. Not surprising, even given the brisk winter weather, but I supposed the dampness would be showing a bit at the seams of my untucked shirt. I wasn’t worried; the man I was about to meet had called me up after 11 p.m. a couple days ago, spoke lazily and comfortably with me and was running late.
I don’t have a habit of spending long bouts of time poring through Craigslist (I use IFTTT to do it for me), but I was still knew a different breed of listing when I read the call for photojournalists put out by BackBones. It sounded perfect – a long-term photographic documentary project about people living with spinal cord injury, and I was looking for a long-term project to better my visual journalism in addition to the photojournalism I was doing for the Chicago Sun-Times and its parent company.
I replied with my experience and portfolio, and after a long interview and wait I was paired up with Joe’s email address and phone number. A couple emails and one late-night phone conversation landed me in the lunch-hour booth of a West-Side Chicago taco joint. I was still gulping ice water to cool off after the walk through windy February air.
When Joe rolled in, he was already smirking about me being there ahead of him. I stood up and indicated the chair I had removed from across the table from me, which he thanked me for. I would have been forced to look up at him when we shook hands, were he not in the wheelchair.
Joe is a tall, athletic guy, though not as big as he was before crashing his car in a winter storm during his sophomore year of college at the University of Iowa. The crash killed his best friend riding in the seat behind him and left Joe paralyzed from his middle-abdominals down.The emotional crash of his friend’s death and his resulting injuries devastated Joe.
Eventually, Joe returened to school, where he graduated and went on to start a successful career in finance and banking. When I talked with him that day over tacos , he had just left his job with The Federal Savings Bank to start a position with a financial software firm in northern Indiana with more growing-room. He owned a spacious condo outside of downtown Chicago where he lived with two of his friends and had just started getting serious with the girl he was dating.
The wheelchair, it was obvious from the first few minutes of listening to Joe talk, never slowed him down now. He told me about his exercise regimen, designed to keep his legs physically stable and, he admitted, at least looking like they were fully capable. He told me how hopeful he was for the future – not only his new job, but he recounted his experiences testing new prosthetic and mechanical walking devices for paraplegics. I don’t think he frowned once through the lunch hour.
We left our lunch and, as we walked/rolled to his specially-built car, I started snapping my first pictures of Joe rolling along the street and sidewalk. Joe rolls the way that a high school football player walks up to the podium – with swagger. He explained to me, and then demonstrated, how difficult it was to get his opposing ramp to open in almost every situation, but in such a nonchalant way that you wouldn’t have thought anything of it a moment later.
He paused while turning to tell me about the design of his current wheelchair, raised his arms and smirked at how much he was talking on our first day together.
