Rolling Thunder : John Callahan’s Dark, Outrageous Cartoons Skewer Quadriplegics, Catholics, Alcoholics, Gays, Fat People. He’s Got Something to Offend Everybody.

THERE’S AN UNEXPECTED PERK THAT GOES WITH THE JOB DEscription “recovering-alcoholic quadriplegic cartoonist”: Women. Lots of them. Strange women approach John Callahan when he’s tooling around Portland, Oregon, in his wheelchair; they tuck phone numbers in his blazer pocket (“Call me any time!”), mail him provocative photographs of themselves and consult him on matters more appropriate for Dr. Ruth.

Two of the “gag hags”--Callahan’s affectionate term for his female admirers--drop by the cartoonist’s Spartan apartment on a recent afternoon. The young women--rapt, eager college students--sit close together on the edge of the couch, gazing expectantly up at their host.

Callahan is an imposing sight.

Enthroned in a hospital bed that dominates his apartment, he is framed by a byzantine system of bars, pulleys and straps he uses to maneuver his body. One freckled arm is hooked casually through an overhead loop.

A solid six-foot-three before his accident, his mass is even greater today thanks to 19 years of immobility. His full, pockmarked face is topped by orange hair. Between his brows is a permanent, twisted knot of concentration.

Callahan’s blue eyes are fixed, at the moment, on his guests. Unsure what to talk about, the women chatter nervously about a party they are throwing that evening.

At mention of the gathering, Callahan looks wistful. “Gee, I wish I wasn’t paralyzed so I could go to your party,” he says.

It’s the sort of remark that brings the gag hags to worship at Callahan’s feet. They thrive on that exhilarating, scary moment when you don’t quite know if you’re supposed to guffaw or squirm with embarrassment. As former National Lampoon editor P.J. O’Rourke wrote, “When people laugh like hell and then say, ‘That’s not funny,’ you can be pretty sure they’re talking about John Callahan.”

Not just anyone can make irreverent cracks about paralysis and get away with it. Yet, in an age when comedy--and all expression--is subject to censorship, Callahan freely lampoons geeks, gays, old people, fat people, epileptics, addicts, Catholics, amputees, the maimed, the dying and the dead. “I think people cut him some slack because he’s handicapped,” says Mark Zusman, Callahan’s editor at Portland’s Willamette Week newspaper. “He knows what it’s like to be a member of the disenfranchised.”

A Vietnam veteran who met the cartoonist in an Alcoholics Anonymous group says, “Because of the background John comes from, he’s able to do and say things no one else is able to say. He has license to explore all sorts of social taboos.”

Callahan, now 40, began paying for his special license as a child growing up in rural Oregon. An alienated adoptee, he sought solace in drinking and was an alcoholic by the age when most kids start thinking about going on their first date. At 21, he moved to Los Angeles, where a drunk-driving accident on a Long Beach Freeway off-ramp left him a quadriplegic. He has limited use of his upper arms and says he’s sensate “from the nipples up.”

Consuming two-fifths of tequila a day by age 27, Callahan experienced an Epiphany--with a capital E--that inspired him to stop drinking.

Once sober, he rediscovered a childhood pastime--scribbling caricatures of friends--and made it pay, first by selling cartoons to local publications such as Willamette Week and the Portland State University Daily Vanguard; later to Penthouse, Hustler, National Lampoon, Omni, Harper’s and the Utne Reader.

He drew what he knew: single-panel and multipanel cartoons--one, a long autobiographical essay told in cartoon form, is called “The Lighter Side of Being Paralyzed for Life”; another series is titled “How to Relate to Handicapped People.” In “How to Relate,” Callahan writes, “How many times has this happened to you: You’re in a public toilet with a quadriplegic. Suddenly he turns to you and says, ‘Say, my hands are a little numb. Would you mind catheterizing me?’ ”

Callahan’s single-panel cartoons, syndicated by Levin Represents, appear in more than 40 daily and alternative newspapers around the country. In Southern California, it appears in the Pasadena Weekly and the San Diego Union. In September, his third book, “Digesting the Child Within,” will be published by William Morrow. A collection of his cartoons, “Do Not Disturb Any Further,” was published last year, and his autobiography, “Don’t Worry, He Won’t Get Far on Foot” (also William Morrow), has been optioned for the screen by actor William Hurt. Callahan says his one stipulation was that Hurt not call the film “Children of a Lesser Quad.”

Analyzing his own appeal, Callahan says, “I think people who have been through a lot in life like my cartoons.” An aspect of his work that makes Callahan popular with the beaten-down masses is the way he contrasts true calamity with minor inconvenience--being paralyzed for life versus missing a party. The theme is illustrated by a cartoon in which a fat man is sprawled on the sidewalk contemplating a mess of spilled candy. The caption: “What kind of a God would allow a thing like this to happen?”

Another Callahan classic: A pair of Ku Klux Klansmen are embarking on a midnight sortie. One white-sheeted figure says to the other: “Don’t you love it when they’re still warm from the dryer?”

Such gags have earned Callahan the respect of his childhood heroes, masters of the sick cartoon. Don Martin, whose gangly, boobish figures are synonymous with the heyday of Mad magazine, says, “I like John’s work very much. I like his boldness.” And Sam Gross of the National Lampoon--described by Callahan as “an outlaw cartoonist, unafraid of the most outlandish sexual situations, disabilities, blindness”--has praised Callahan for his “guts, brains and fingers.” A latter-day twisted cartoonist, “Far Side” creator Gary Larson, has said of Callahan: “He makes my own work look normal.”

NOT EVERYONE HAS BEEN SO IMPRESSED. A Portland support group for overweight women took offense at Callahan’s jibes (example: a fat woman wearing a dress densely patterned with the words “I am fat” is asked by a sales clerk, “Have you considered something in a solid color?”); a Seattle organization for people with eating disorders was not thrilled with “The Anorexic Cafe” (a sign in the cafe window says, “Now closed 24 hours a day!!!”). And when the Carmel-based Coast Weekly ran the cartoon showing a blood-splattered dog pierced by a shard of glass with the caption, “How much is that window in the doggie?” “howls of protest went out all over the community,” says Chuck Thurman, arts and entertainment editor for the paper. The Coast Weekly has since dropped the cartoonist.

Callahan says he’s been taken to task by “Christians, queers, teachers, foreign nationals, janitors, lab rats. . . . People are fairly hypocritical about what it’s OK to joke about,” he says. “People will stand on street corners and tell jokes about anything--nuns will. But if it’s in print, it’s a whole different story.”

When Callahan strays from his own experience, he sometimes misses the mark. The cartoonist’s hard-won insights into alienation, alcoholism and quadriplegia do not necessarily translate into adept satire of gays or women, for instance. More than one Callahan cartoon with an anal-sex motif seems homophobic--or, at least, childish. But when the cartoonist concentrates on life’s cruel little quirks, he is unassailable. As Linda Ellerbee observed in a column: “Hooray for the John Callahans of this world, who remind us that when you’re standing on the gallows (and we all are), gallows humor makes good sense.”

Recently, Callahan has found another outlet for his outlook: songwriting. Performed by the Clamtones in small clubs and restaurants in Portland, his compositions range from straight gospel (“Every Knee Shall Bend”) to cynical commentary (“Pollution Is the Solution”).

Often profiled in the Northwest, Callahan has refined his shtick for the media. “He feels like he has it down. It’s real pat,” says his Venice-based agent and mother-confessor, Deborah Levin. Invariably, Callahan leads television crews or reporters on a high-speed wheelchair tour of his Portland neighborhood. Standard stops are the “trendoid” cafe where Callahan meets his public, the offices of Willamette Week, where he picks up his latest batch of fan mail, and the subterranean garage where Callahan’s friend, Kevin, parks cars and writes poems no one sees.

Callahan’s electric wheelchair stops, starts, speeds up and pivots with no warning; his body--the parts he can move--is in constant motion, arms gesticulating or brushing the pale-orange bangs back from his forehead. Not a block goes by that someone doesn’t wave or shout “Callahan!” as if they’d spied a lucky Lotto ticket.

All the time Callahan is dodging tricky curb cuts (“I always fall flat on my face here”) and acknowledging his fans, he keeps up a rapid-fire commentary on the passing scene, trying on gags that occur to him. When he hits on one, he’ll ask, in the hopeful tone of a 6-year-old presenting a crayon drawing for approval: “You like it? Is that funny? You think that’s funny?”

What he looks for on his rounds are visual or verbal cliches, he explains. These are the foundation of the cartoon: the two winos on the park bench, the executive with his finger on the intercom button, the girl jumping out of a cake.

Callahan’s preference is for cliches of bum luck. He’s fascinated by the absurdities--poverty, sickness, disability--life dumps on people, indiscriminate of rank. “I see people as, in the final analysis, helpless,” he says. “The whores, the society women, the bums, the executives, the hustlers and the hustled are up against the same wall. And their desperation is funny, exciting to me.”

Whether or not Callahan comes up with a workable gag, the media tour serves its purpose. It establishes Callahan as the freewheeling quad-about-town and helps postpone the inevitable discussion about his past.

His harrowing youth--unflinchingly documented in his autobiography--makes Callahan an easy mark for drama junkies; he has learned to fend off strangers who come to him expecting confession and revelation.

Callahan grew up 80 miles east of Portland in The Dalles, which he has described as “a sleepy wheat port with a small Irish Catholic community surrounded by snakes, lizards and Mormons.” Childhood summers were spent launching log rafts on the cold Columbia River, chasing frogs, picking cherries and sleeping out in homemade tents. Yet even in the midst of these classic boyhood pursuits, Callahan was always concealing feelings of grief and loss.

The unspoken object of his sadness was an Irish Catholic woman named Maggie Lynch, who gave Callahan up for adoption at birth, probably fearing scandal and ostracism because she was unmarried. Lynch’s baby boy was reared by nuns for six months before he was adopted by David Callahan, a grain broker, and his wife, Rosemary. The Callahans had thought themselves unable to have a child of their own but went on to conceive five children after adopting John.

The sole redhead in a clan of dark-haired Callahans, John always felt “squashed down in anonymity,” the odd kid out. While his siblings were carefree and fun-loving, John was a young insomniac obsessed with death, art and Russian novels. Not only had his own mother abandoned him (a development that inspired a lasting distrust of women), but he also felt excluded from his adoptive family. “I’m convinced that I experienced a sense of loss even as an infant, and as childhood wore on, I spent more and more time by myself, thinking about my own strangeness.”

Years later, an all-consuming hunt for his natural mother culminated in the news that she had died in a car accident when he was 12--the age at which he began raiding the liquor cabinets of his friends’ parents. His feelings of alienation were complicated by the aura of what he calls “pious fear” in his Catholic home and school and further cemented by a terrible case of teen-age acne. Everything was conspiring to make him an outsider.

He found temporary respite from his anger and loneliness by sketching caricatures of fellow students and teachers. It was worth losing a friend over a particularly unflattering portrait if it would win him some attention.

Upon graduation from high school, Callahan took jobs that interfered as little as possible with his drinking--working as an orderly at a state mental hospital, for instance. In 1972, for a change of scene, he followed a drinking buddy to Los Angeles.

On a hot July night, Callahan and a friend were touring Orange County bars, becoming progressively drunker. After a stop at a topless joint, the friend took the wheel of Callahan’s Volkswagen bug. Traveling at 90 miles an hour, he slammed into a utility pole. “The Volkswagen folded up like an accordion, causing minor injuries to my friend but neatly severing my spine,” Callahan wrote. “I didn’t notice, though. I was too drunk.”

He was pronounced a C5-6 quadriplegic. “That’s about halfway between decathlon champion and rigor mortis. I can work my triceps, half of my deltoids, half of my diaphragm. If I don’t watch it, I can choke to death. I can extend my fingers, but not close them around a fork or pen.” To draw his cartoons, he wedges a pencil between the stiff fingers of his right hand and guides it with his left hand--the control coming from his shoulders. The primitive look of Callahan’s drawings is often attributed to his physical limitations, but it’s an artistic decision. The crude style draws more attention to his gag lines, he says.

For pure horror, Callahan’s description of his convalescence in the intensive-care ward at Harbor General Hospital in Torrance (now Harbor-UCLA Medical Center) rivals similar scenes in the film “Born on the Fourth of July.” He was immobilized on an electric bed that was rotated every two hours or so; he was either facing the ceiling or the floor. To hold his spine straight, holes were drilled into his skull and screws with eyelets inserted in the holes. “To these (eyelets) were fastened cables that ran over pulleys to attached weights. IVs were run into my arms, and a nasogastric tube was shoved down my nose.” “I remained thus crucified for six weeks,” he wrote in his autobiography. Loaded on morphine and Demerol, Callahan was never able to escape the din of the unit, the screams of the dying or his own pain and panic.

“I couldn’t get used to the lack of sensation,” he recalls. “I felt nothing but my head and shoulder blades pressing on the hard slab beneath my back. I felt like a floating head.” His parents visited after the accident but then became increasingly remote, out of a feeling of helplessness, he believes. They are still distant.

Once he had healed enough to be moved, Callahan was transferred to Rancho Los Amigos Hospital in Downey, a rehabilitation center where, among other things, he would learn to bring a fork to his mouth. There were lessons covering “transfers”--the art of moving from bed to chair, chair to couch, etc.--as well as tips on preventing bedsores and making love.

Though without feeling in his genitals, he learned he was capable of reflexogenic erections, achieved by massaging his stomach. The sex-education sessions were accompanied by porn flicks showing quadriplegics and paraplegics engaged in erotic endeavors. Callahan judged the films “gritty and humorless enough to put anybody off sex for years.”

Callahan exhibits a teen-age bravado about his subsequent sexual encounters, yet he spends a lot of time talking about the difficulties he has relating to women intimately. Some of this has to do with his early perceived rejection by a woman--his mother--but it’s also a function of severe disability. He’s dubious about the image of the happily married quad that was drilled into him in rehab sessions.

Once graduated from Rancho and installed in the first of a series of miserable living situations, Callahan had little incentive to curb his drinking. For a while, he shared a Santa Ana slum apartment with his attendant, a 66-year-old retired machinist. Entertainment consisted of watching planes go by through the bedroom window. “ ‘This is going to be my life,’ I thought. ‘Sitting, smoking and trying to make conversation with an old redneck whose chief cultural interest is stock-car racing,’ ” he recalls.

Given Callahan’s predisposition to despair, it’s amazing that he survived this variation on his lifelong theme of hopelessness and emptiness. In fact, his friends thought he would not survive. Callahan had moved back to Oregon and was living in a nursing home run by Benedectine nuns when he reconnected with childhood friend John Chambers.

“John (Callahan) was so self-destructive, we figured he’d be gone in a couple of years,” Chambers says. “God, he was sloppy. It was pathetic. You felt really sad for him, but then again you didn’t want him around.”

Chambers remembers driving Callahan around, a can of beer wedged between the passenger’s wobbly legs, a straw clamped between his teeth. “He’d just suck that thing down, and we’d have to get him another one. We were constantly getting him beer, then emptying his urine bag.” (A urine-collecting apparatus is patch-glued to an opening in the lower right side of his abdomen.)

Within the bitter, drunken disbeliever Callahan had become was a Catholic kid who still responded to the “medieval calm” of an abbey and retained a tentative susceptibility to grace--however much his everyday persona might reject such things.

One day in the spring of 1978, Callahan’s current attendant, Alex, left their shared apartment to run some errands, placing an unopened wine bottle within Callahan’s reach.

Callahan gnawed at the cork for an hour without budging it. “When I dropped the bottle, watching it roll away across the rug, something snapped,” he wrote. “I began to scream. I screamed at God. . . . I began to cry like a kid.”

After sobbing for an hour, Callahan says he felt a reassuring hand patting him on the back. He describes it as a physical sensation, though there was no one else in the room. The capital-E Epiphany. He rolled his chair over to the phone and called Alcoholics Anonymous.

Today, the AA manual, the Big Book, shares a place of honor atop Callahan’s refrigerator with his bound collection of Mad magazines. It’s fitting that the publications be so joined, for when Callahan stopped drinking, he began to draw.

His friend Mike met Callahan at an AA meeting at about this time and observed the fledgling cartoonist emerging. “Now and then he’d throw out a little torn-off piece of paper with a cartoon figure of somebody on it,” Mike says. Callahan’s cartoons had a therapeutic effect. In a particularly difficult phase of recovery, John would “pop a joke and pivot my day.” Despite the feedback he was getting from friends, Callahan initially resisted the idea of becoming a cartoonist. If he was going to be an artist, he should be a serious poet like his hero, Bob Dylan, he thought, or a writer like James Joyce. (After he sobered up, Callahan earned a bachelor’s degree in English from Portland State University.)

Cartooning as a career was further discouraged (inadvertently) by welfare caseworkers, who threatened to terminate Callahan’s Medicaid benefits every time he made a buck on a cartoon--a problem that persists to this day. Callahan’s finances are complicated: He often has to pay one welfare agency with money from another in order to qualify for aid, and he has been cut off from both state aid and Social Security at various times--whenever his cartoons turned slightly profitable. (His cartoon income seldom covers his medical expenses--which run about $1,500 a month, including attendants, if nothing goes wrong.) Frustrated by a disincentive system that encourages him not to work, Callahan sometimes wonders, “Why don’t I just buy a bottle of wine, check into a cheap hotel and throw away my cartoons?” Ultimately, though, Callahan gave in and dedicated himself to his craft.

JUDGING BY HIS PASSIONATE FAN MAIL, HIS work speaks to adoptees, recovering alcoholics and people dealing with all manner of tragedy and pain. But Callahan’s contribution has perhaps been greatest in the disabled community. “He’s quite well-loved by our group,” says Mary Johnson, editor of the Disability Rag, a spirited national disability-rights journal out of Kentucky. “He really sees the ridiculous situation society puts disabled people in.”

Example: A cartoon shows two trunkless heads mounted on skid carts. One head has a patch over his eye. The patchless head turns to the other and says: “People like you are a real inspiration to me.”

Callahan is not entirely comfortable with being an inspiration to recovering alcoholics and people with disabilities. In an unguarded moment, he acknowledges the importance of that role: “What can you do in life that’s more important than helping someone else?” More often, however, he shies away from being identified with the groups who claim him as a hero. Asked if he has many disabled friends, he jokes: “Naw, they’re always asking for money.”

After a day spent beating the streets for cartoon visions of despair, Callahan returns to his ascetic apartment in the basement of a four-story brownstone, surrounded by rose bushes, in northwest Portland. The few adornments include a director’s chair emblazoned with the name Stanley--Callahan’s cat.

Callahan must return home every night for an appointment with his evening attendant, Marlos, a slim, quiet Brazilian who prepares him for bed. Callahan remains in bed until the next morning at 8, when the morning attendant, Bill, arrives for a grueling three-hour routine, which Callahan has described as being “penetrated, pumped out, squeezed dry, scrubbed down, hoisted up and down.” The morning ritual includes a set of range-of-motion exercises to keep Callahan’s arms and legs flexible. The cartoonist claims to accompany these exercises with a boisterous round of “C’mon baby, do the range of motion,” based on the ‘60s favorite.

After Marlos leaves for the night, Callahan takes his ever-ringing phone off the hook, props a pillow on his lap and begins to work. At night, he can drop the flippant pose that has shielded him all day. There are no gag hags waiting to revel in a caustic remark, no reporters demanding confession, no disability activists trying to sign him up.

He’s alone with his cat and his tea and the images he’s collected during the day. “I may be dragging a little, I may have been tired and depressed all day, but at night it’s my time,” Callahan says. “I feel magical.”

Cartoons distributed by Levin Represents; artwork courtesy of NobleWorks