Ruby Cooper
Appearances
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
After a year of him badgering me, I gave in. Parked on a dark country road in my mom's 1959 Dodge with a push-button transmission and a back seat as big as a double bed, I had sex with my boyfriend. He was happy. Me, not so much.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
What I didn't know is that I had gotten pregnant. Yeah. With twins. It was 1960 and I was 16. Six and a half months later, I gave birth to two little boys. Only one survived, but he spent the next three months in a preemie bin struggling to live alone while I watched him through a murky plate glass window because they never allowed me to touch him.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
When I finally got him out of there, I thought, I'm never going to let this kid get away from me again. A few months later, when he was 10 months old, through a routine visit with the pediatrician, he said, this kid has cerebral palsy. He'll never walk or probably won't talk. I don't know. You're young. You can have more children.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
I'll give you the name of a place where you can take him where he'll be with others of his kind. And I was stunned. I said, his kind? I'm his mom. I'm his kind. He's going home with me. And... Kirk just grew. He was a beautiful, beautiful baby with these great big green, blue, just hazel kind of almond-shaped eyes and possibly long eyelashes and a big smile. And he grew into this gregarious...
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
confident kid that just just everybody was attracted to on our on his first day of school I think he was seven years old and I it was in a little wheelchair and I pushed him down the hallway and he goes hi I Kirk hi I Kirk like he was running for office And he'd lost his first tooth.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
And I said, oh, what will happen is that the ferry will, we'll put the tooth under the pillow and a ferry will come at night and exchange it for money. And he looked at me like I was crazy. And he said, no, mine bring pie. Pie? The Tooth Fairy doesn't have pie. The Tooth Fairy has money. He said, mine bring pie. And I said, what kind of pie? And he said, chocolate.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
And the following morning, the Tooth Fairy from the local bakery had delivered a chocolate pie. And Kirk loved to swim, loved the water. And so I would take, I would take the little, put the little Mae West out thingy on him, the vest, and I would jam him into a tractor trailer inner tube. and tie a rope on it. And I could, hey, I was a single mother, a teenage mother. Think about that.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
And I would drop him into any body of water, you know, and he could paddle around and I could pull him in with a rope. Listen. Nothing happened to him, for God's sake. And so one time we were on a little lake in my friend's ski boat, and he was watching us. There were just two women and him, and girls, teenagers. And finally he just had enough of it, and he said, I want to ski.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
And we looked at each other and said, why not? So we dropped him over the back of the boat, and Janie's driving, and she drove along real slow, and he's having a really good time and laughing, and then she revved it up. And he's just like, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. And we're just having a great time. We got back to the beach, and this...
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
I don't know, big, old, punchy, red-faced guy stomped over there to us and said, I saw you out there with that baby just pulling it along. You endangered his life, and I should have the authorities come and take him away from you. And I said, fuck you. We're just having fun. And Kirk said, yeah. And you're no fun at all. Well, Kirk grew into a young man.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
When he was 22 years old, I moved him into a group home close by where we lived in California. And He met a bunch, five, six guys that had different varying disabilities. And they would spend their time just talking and hanging out. And most of the conversation was about girls and how to meet them and about sex.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
And I would come and visit, and they would have come up with these schemes for me to get involved in. And I said, no, no, not at all. I am not, no. And I would leave and go home and forget about it.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
And that year, about a couple months before Christmas, I called Kirk and I said, hey, your sisters and I are wondering, Christmas is coming up, and we're wondering if there's anything special that you would like to have for Christmas. And he said, I want to have sex. I said, sex? Sex is not a Christmas present. Videos and stinky cologne and sweaters and shit you don't need, that's Christmas.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
Sex, I can't, it's illegal. I can't buy, I'll go to, I could go to jail. You could get a disease, it's not a good idea. No, and when I finished ranting, I said, you know what, I don't even know where I would look for it. I have no idea about this park. And he said, you could find it in Milwaukee. So. So I talked to my friends.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
My friend Jamie, who was a bartender, put a big pickle jar on the bar that said, Get Kirk Sex Fund. I gotta tell you, that jar filled with paper money so fast, you wouldn't believe it, because that is a cause that men believe in. I looked everywhere.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
I started, you know, I could have gotten picked up because I looked at all of the women, everybody at any bus stop, any place, you know, trying, and I thought, no, no. Nobody knew anybody. Nobody knew. I didn't know how to do this. And finally, I remembered that my friend, I had a friend named Bill, and he was a manager of the Onslow Hotel in Reno, Nevada. Yeah.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
So I called him and told him what Kirk wanted for Christmas, and he said, hell yeah. Great. Bring him up here. He said, I'll take him to the Mustang Ranch. The Mustang Ranch, by the way, is the oldest brothel in the United States of America. In Sparks, Nevada, it is known for, you know, it's just a good run place from what I hear. And he said, as a matter of fact, bring the whole family.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
I'll give you family rates at the hotel and we'll have Christmas dinner at my place. I said, okay. So I tell her. He's excited, he can't stand it. I said, now we gotta call my mother. Because my mother lived in Pennsylvania and spent Christmas, you know, holiday with us. And she's a little old-fashioned, kinda. And I didn't know how this would go over. And so I said, Kirk, you tell her.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
And... So... So as soon as she answered the phone, he said, Grandma, you've got to come to Reno for Christmas. And she said, oh, Reno. Why, honey? Are we going to Reno? And he said, because I'm going to have sex, Grandma. And there was a silence. And I thought, shit, she's fainted. No. But she didn't. She rallied. She said, isn't that nice? How much does it cost? And I said, I don't know, Ma.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
They don't give quotes over the phone. So she said, well, put me down for 50. To love my mother. So on Christmas Eve Day, FYI, the Mustang Ranch is closed on Christmas Day, in case you need to know. But on Christmas Eve Day, we were at the hotel. His sisters got him all bathed and primped and powdered up like he was a bride. And we drove over to Bill's.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
My mother goes into the kitchen to start the turkey and stuff. And Bill and Kirk go heading out to the Mustang Ranch. In about an hour and a half, I don't know, I wasn't counting, but... Not too long. And I hear them outside coming up laughing. And Kirk, when he left, his muscles were so tight and he was so nervous and full of anxiety and scared.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
And now when I open the door, he's just like laying in his wheelchair looking like Gumby with this big smile on his face. And I said, wow, back already? And he goes, she was real nervous. And so I just laughed and gave him this great big hug. And I said, hey guys, you know, everybody, I have a bottle of champagne.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
I think we should have a Christmas toast to the Christmas spirit, to family, to friends, to giving and receiving. Thank you.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
I tried to give him a regular life, as much as close to just a typical male life as I could. I didn't baby him. I didn't. That wasn't part of it. It was just he couldn't walk, but he could think and laugh and laugh. And have friends and everything else.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
I mean, I like adventure, and I like to do things. And he was with me on it. It was like, all right, now let's go.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
Oh, they say, I wish you were my mother. Oh. Men say that to me, would say that to me a lot. I've had people come up and cry. The first time I ever told it was at the cemetery, Greenview?
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
Greenwood. And this woman came up hugging me. And I guess her first cousin had cerebral palsy. And she said his mother kept him there. cloistered in the house all the time. He never got to do anything. And she said, I just thought about him the whole time of what life could have been like for him.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
The disability is not who they are. Who they are is inside. It doesn't, that's not, we take, we spend too much time worrying about what people look like and what they can do. My mother said to me when I was crying, when I was told he would be quadriplegic and they wanted to put him in the home, and I refused. And I said, I don't know what I'm going to do.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
I don't know what this will be like or anything. And she said, you don't need to know what it is. It's just you have a baby. She said, we don't love him. for what he will do or won't do. We love him because he is ours.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
They were like, I don't know, the tongue in the shoe. You know, I mean, they were just so close. I have a picture of, that makes me cry practically. I have it in a frame, but I don't have it where I see it all the time because it's too emotional. She's old. She's sitting at the edge of a pool, and she has had a couple surgeries, so she's a little on the crooked side. He's crooked.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
He's in his, you know, she's got her arm around him, and there they are. They've been swimming, and now they're sitting together at the edge of the pool. I have a picture of them She, I guess he was on his beanbag or something, and she leaned down and kissed him. And I got a real close-up picture of her just kissing him. She loved him. He loved her.
The Moth
The Moth Radio Hour: The Pursuit of Happiness
When he was dying, I said, you know, all you have to do when you want to go is ask for a grandma. She'll come get you. And he did. He said, Mama, I want my grandma.