A Brawler Takes Up Novelist’s Pen

Charles Wheeler offered a good-natured apology but couldn’t suppress a grin when he heard a visitor had disabled a car trying to negotiate the steep, rutted, rock-strewn cowpath up to his rustic mountain retreat.

He has gone to great lengths to put a rugged buffer between himself and the world, and he clearly was pleased to learn it works. As satisfied as he is that people are discovering his fiction, Wheeler hopes no one discovers him.

A disdain for celebrity would hardly surprise those who knew Wheeler before an accident blinded him 14 years ago. Back then, he was a biker and a brawler; he worked on building sites, not novels, and spent his leisure time in crowded bars, not secluded retreats.

His first novel, “Snakewalk,” has just been published by Harmony Books, a division of Crown, and his agent is asking him to sign a deal to film his semi-autobiography about coping with blindness. First novelists at this point should be ecstatic. Wheeler would rather be left alone.

“Once you get out of all that man-made stress (of the city), you can focus on what you are and why you’re here,” he explained after a day of work at his retreat, which is at the moment a rough campsite with a trailer. “You have to live in a place that’s in tune with your own electrochemical reactions.”

Nothing Affected About Him

If it sounds like loopy, affected authorspeak, forget it. There’s nothing discernibly loopy or affected about the tall, lean, 42-year-old author whose presence--not to mention his goatee and flinty expression--hint at his affection for motorcycles. “Moving here also took off a lot of the social pressures on me,” he added thoughtfully, referring to a long but vague list of dust-ups with cops and others who ran afoul of his unyielding personal sense of right and wrong.

He paused, pulled hard on a can of Miller High Life, then offered candidly, “You won’t find a lot of people who like me.”

That is hard to believe after spending an evening with the author, his wife, Jaimie, and their 17-month-old son, Kendal Gus, at their bucolic home site in the Cascade Range near this quaint southern Oregon college town.

Then again, it is quite evident that Wheeler, like his protagonist Patrick Todd in “Snakewalk,” is not one to calmly suffer others’ shortcomings. Especially not people who subscribe to what he calls the “adipose guide”--mindless slaves to conformity, convention and greed.

What people will find, if Wheeler allows them to, is an engaging paradox: a gentle family man and sensitive naturalist with an unrepented history of fast, sometimes violent living and an insatiable appetite for adrenaline.

He is a man with a love of speed so intense that he recently bought a long-coveted Porsche, even though his blindness keeps him from behind the wheel.

“I still like fast things,” he confessed. “I still like the risk factor in life.”

He is, also, a man with enough talent to give sighted people--”eyeballs” he calls them--a vivid glimpse of life without sight.

Wheeler was blinded in 1975 when a friend’s fishing boat capsized and disintegrated in rough weather, seriously wounding the 28-year-old heavy equipment operator and hell-raiser shortly before he was to leave for Alaska, where he hoped to make enough money to go into business for himself.

Fictional Version

“Snakewalk” is a fictional retelling of the accident and subsequent effort of young, tough, lustful Patrick Todd to deal with sudden blindness--and in turn resolve his own identity and learn to try to balance intellect with impulse.

The story unfolds at the fictional California Institute for the Blind, in a San Francisco Bay Area town not unlike Wheeler’s blue-collar boyhood hometown, El Cerrito, Calif. The snakewalk is a serpentine path where new “blinks,” or blind-school students, gather to drink and talk. As the most direct route from the school to a busy street, Wheeler adds, the snakewalk also is the metaphorical link between the worlds of those who cannot see and those who can.

Wheeler’s protagonist adjusts slowly to the school, where he comes to learn to read Braille, translate such routine tasks as banking into other senses and develop the ability to navigate without eyes.

He also learns, from a hard-drinking part-Indian spiritual and intellectual alter ego called Cole Saunders, to redirect his anger, intelligence and energy to something other than fighting, fishing and female conquests.

At the same time, in the style of Ken Kesey, Wheeler’s character shares his personal courage, iconoclasm and unshakable zest for life with the more timid students around him.

Wheeler said he began working on the novel “as a kind of therapy after the accident,” hoping to gain some personal insight into his disability while also offering sighted people a different, more realistic perspective on blindness.

Revealed an Outlet

Therapy became avocation when Wheeler’s early writing introduced him to his latent talent. He realized fiction offered him a satisfying new outlet for the passion and energy he previously spent on racing and carousing.

He said his confidence and ambition flowered when a Playboy magazine editor attached an encouraging letter to a rejection slip for one of Wheeler’s short stories, the tale of an eccentric who collects unmentionable souvenirs in the women’s room of a Wyoming roadhouse.

At “blink school,” as he calls the rehabilitation center, Wheeler said he realized a blind man is better off working with his brain instead of his back, and he enrolled as a philosophy student at Solano Community College in Suisun City, Calif. Meanwhile, he expanded his written observations on blindness, the heart of “Snakewalk,” to novel length.

He continued working on the project after transferring to UC Davis, to which he commuted twice a week by Greyhound bus from a riverfront home in tiny Anderson, Calif., more than 100 miles away.

After starting at Davis, he changed his field of study to creative writing, quitting philosophy and giving up his earlier goal of going to law school.

At Davis, Wheeler met two women who profoundly influenced his life.

One was a fellow student, Jaimie Bernhagen, an engaging Dana Point, Calif., native who became his fourth wife a year and a half ago.

The other was the instructor who taught his final graduate writing seminar, writer Diane Johnson (“Terrorists and Novelists,” “Persian Nights”), who recognized in his master’s project the kernel of what later became “Snakewalk.”

Johnson introduced Wheeler and his manuscript to San Francisco literary agent Bonnie Nadell. She forwarded the novel to Michael Pietsch, an editor at Harmony Books in New York. Pietsch wrestled with Wheeler through numerous rewrites that finally produced a tight, smooth narrative.

Wheeler lauded four people--Bernhagen, Johnson, Nadell and Pietsch--in an introduction to his book, but he reserves particular praise for his wife.

Special Praise

“Everybody’s making a big deal out of me, but we are no better than who we are with,” he said. “I wouldn’t be doing any of this if Jaimie wasn’t here with me.”

As she gets up to tend their son, he leaned over and proudly confided: “We must have lived together in another life. We are real comfortable together.”

He said his wife helps him with his writing process, which involves working out a story in his head and dictating early drafts into a tape recorder before entering later drafts into a home computer equipped with a voice synthesizer.

Jaimie, who has literary interests of her own and hopes to return to school soon to complete college, modestly shrugged off Wheeler’s praise, as she later dismissed the hardships of their crude encampment, a trailer with no utilities.

“Ever since we arrived there, we wanted to leave,” she said, referring to their former home, a ranch-style house overlooking the Sacramento River near Anderson. “A pool to maintain, a lawn to mow, fences penning the dogs--it just was not our cup of tea. We are actually much happier in this 39-foot fifth-wheel (camp trailer) than we were there.”

“I miss some of the conveniences,” Wheeler added, citing the present need to bathe outdoors in icy spring water, “but if your sense of humor stays intact, you can get through most anything.”

One of his biggest problems so far is the impact he is having on the land. He still broods over a rattlesnake accidentally crushed by the bulldozer the day he arrived. And he laments a skunk killed by his dogs: Generally, he appreciates his Oregon retreat and doesn’t miss California even a little bit.

‘In a Dog Kennel’

“In California--I won’t say all of it, but just about all of it--you are in a dog kennel,” he said. “You go for what you can get for yourself when you can get it without worrying about the overall peace. If you can go for the throat of the big boy next to you, then you grab him by the throat and rip out the jugular. Automatically. Reflexively.

“That is what I write about. I write about a dissolving civilization--the decline of compassion of one human being for another.”

Such startling observations are not unusual when talking to Wheeler.

“Usually,” he opined at another point in the evening, “the cream of your society is found in bars, soaking up alcohol and numbing themselves from their own potential because that’s easier than endeavoring to change things.”

For the record, Wheeler, a former world-class drinker who still is familiar with a beer 12-pack, avoids bars these days--ever since irritating some locals by toppling a local arm-wrestling champion.

As quickly as some topics can irritate him, others can just as swiftly calm him. One is the pleasure of writing. Another is the enjoyment of hiking in the woods with his four dogs.

“When my facial vision is working, I can walk anywhere with the dogs,” he said, referring to the use of nerve-packed facial tissue to sense obstacles in one’s path. “When it isn’t working, I might as well be in a closet.”

Not that that indicates any measure of surrender to a handicap. Not in someone who responded to counselors who said it would take two years to master Braille by learning it in two weeks.

“I’m like a salmon,” he said. “Someone will dam a river, and salmon will wear off their faces nosing around for some way to get past it.”

Hardships are not new to Wheeler, the second-oldest of eight children of an El Cerrito police officer. Wheeler said his father moved the family into a converted chicken coop. The $3,500 price meant manageable monthly payments of $15, but Wheeler said his dad still owed $1,700 on it when he died in 1961 in a boating accident.

Books were scarce in his home. Wheeler read little before he lost his sight. Since then, he has followed the advice of teachers and listened to many hours of tape-recorded American masters, including Faulkner and Hemingway.

That Wheeler’s father was a policeman will come as a surprise to people who know the author. Not only has he had his share of often violent confrontations with police officers--most recently in Anderson, where a run-in cost him five days in the county lock-up--but the police also serve as antagonists in much of his writing.

“There are good cops and bad cops, like anything else,” Wheeler said with a shrug, placing his father in the former category.

Indeed, Wheeler is eager to make sure that any film version of his book has balance with all his characters, including the blind students.

“I spent a lot of time and a lot of pain on this,” he said, “and I don’t want to see blind people slabbed out there, as being all one thing or another. They’re as individual as anyone else.”

Despite the praise implicit in the remarkable process by which his work was discovered and favorable pre-publication reviews, Wheeler believes he has only begun the process of developing his talent.

“I am still in the minor leagues as a writer,” he said, keeping an ear on his son as he played near a bulldozer and backhoe resting on land destined for a large log home supplied with water and power from a nearby spring. “I still have so much to learn about my craft. I think of ‘Bottoms’ as my real debut as a writer.”

“Bottoms” is a second novel, still in progress, about the denizens of a Texas junkyard. It is loosely based, he said, on the experiences of a family friend, called Grandy in the book, who quit the aerospace business “to open up that junkyard and make millions off the discards of America.”

Wheeler smiles at the absurdity of that notion, and at the junkyard owner’s conviction that only compulsive womanizing will keep him alive forever. And he relishes recalling how the real Grandy, whom Wheeler considers a second father and after whom he named his younger son, valiantly resisted the big-money boys who came to buy him out.

“He’s a hard-headed old man,” Wheeler said, “and about the only friend I have.”

Relying so directly on his own life gives him no pause.

“Everything I write is going to be autobiographical,” he said flatly.

For now, however, Wheeler is not writing at all. He has a publicity tour for “Snakewalk” and prefers focusing his energy on improving his retreat, where the only electricity comes from automobile batteries.

“I’ve got three other books--four, possibly--kicking around in my brain all the time,” he said. “When one gets ripe, I’ll stop and write it. I will have to.”