Two for the Road

The fares blur after 15 years of driving a cab. But as he takes a final drag on a predawn cigarette, Stan Gilweit has one fare he looks forward to.

For eight years, Gilweit has been spending about four hours every day transporting Sean Matthew Putnam, an 11-year-old South Pasadena boy who uses a wheelchair, to school and physical therapy.

Over thousands of miles, the divorced cabbie and the cerebral palsy patient have formed an unlikely friendship. Gilweit takes Sean to school at 7:45 a.m., picks him up at 2:30 p.m., hangs out with him at home for a while, then watches Sean go through 30 to 60 minutes of therapy. He is paid a flat fee by the South Pasadena school district, but the commitment extends far beyond business.

“There’s a bond there,” Gilweit said, groping for words. “He feels . . . I think . . . I know he feels secure when he’s with me . . . when I’m there. Me and him are buddies.”

Hearing this, Sean beams.

“Without him,” the boy says slowly, pausing to push more air past his vocal cords, “I wouldn’t get to where I need to go.”

Sean’s mother, Lori Putnam, remembers the first time Gilweit showed up on their doorstep in 1993. She was petrified. She wasn’t about to hand over her fragile, 3-year-old son to a guy with “long, scraggly hair, a tank top and missing teeth.”

Her husband, Philip, soothed Lori. If anyone was going to be snatched, he told her, it wouldn’t be a boy who needed 24-hour care. He was too much trouble to kidnap. Just in case, Lori snapped pictures of Gilweit’s license plates.

She laughs about it now, but after everything she had been through with Sean, overreaction was relative.

Sean was born 11 weeks premature and weighed less than 3 pounds. The next day, he had a stroke that doctors said caused cerebral palsy, a neurological disorder. At 4 weeks, he had surgery to close a valve in his heart. At 7 weeks, for the first time, Lori was finally allowed to hold her son, whose tiny body wriggled in her open palm. His entire arm was the length of her thumb.

When he was finally able to come home, the boy remained hooked to a machine that monitored his breathing. He regularly woke up with night terrors, screaming hysterically: After months in the brightly lit hospital, he was terrified of the dark. He started speech therapy at 1 1/2, said his first word at 2 and began speaking in complete, labored sentences at 3. He started going to a special school in El Monte, and Gilweit became his cabdriver.

Strapped into the back seat of Gilweit’s battered Chevrolet, Sean spends hours lost in his thoughts, dreaming about being a superhero or Power Ranger.

“We’re going to conquer the world!” he says as loud as he can in his gravelly voice. At other times, he sits back and listens to his favorite oldies. Sean can sing along to most Beatles tunes, Gilweit said. Sometimes, the two just sit and talk. Actually, Gilweit says, Sean does all the talking.

“We talk like guys talk,” Gilweit said. “I’m not his parent or his teacher. When we’re together, we’re friends.”

Between school and therapy, Gilweit sits with Sean in the family living room and the two watch cartoons together. At therapy, the cabdriver watches as the boy learns how to use a wheelchair operated by moving his head.

As he watches, the hard lines on Gilweit’s face soften. The weary blue eyes that often appear unimpressed with life shine with pride. Gilweit prefers to talk about his admiration for Sean (“the determined son of a gun”) than about himself.

Years ago, Gilweit’s own family life crumbled when he divorced his wife. His two daughters, now grown, have children of their own. In a box somewhere in his Temple City home, Gilweit has a collection of photos chronicling Sean’s childhood.

“When I want to know what’s going on with my son, I ask Stan,” Lori said. “It’s a very deep relationship. I know he would do anything for my son.”

The darkest time during their relationship was the summer Sean was in a body cast after surgery in 1998. The operation was one in a series that began when he was 5 to correct his legs, insert a pump to relax his muscles, fix a broken bone and repair his hip.

The hip operation left the usually upbeat Sean feeling depressed. A couple of times he told his mother life was just too hard and he wanted to die. At one point, Lori went to the nearest library and checked out books on famous figures who were also in wheelchairs, like President Franklin D. Roosevelt. She read these books to Sean, who lay in a horizontal wheelchair, his body covered in plaster from his toes to his chest.

One Sunday afternoon, Lori took Sean out to eat. There, in an Armenian burger joint with belly dancers, she saw famed physicist Stephen Hawking, who uses a wheelchair because of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, better known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. That summer, Hawking had become Sean’s hero. (“I thought he’d be more of a lobster person,” Sean later said.)

The two met and talked for half an hour. Sean sat, slowly asking questions with each shallow breath, and Hawking sat, tapping out responses on his computer using only his thumb. He told Sean not to worry about his handicap and to reach for greatness. Lori cried and still does when she talks about it. Sean immediately told Stan.

Life got better. Today Sean is a straight-A sixth-grade student at South Pasadena Middle School. He spends his school hours with an aide who takes notes for him. He dreams of working with computers. His mother says doctors have told her he has the life expectancy of an average person.

At times, Stan thinks the boy is being pushed too hard, then thinks maybe it’s Sean who is doing the pushing.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if someday Sean’s right up there with that scientist,” Gilweit said. “Hey, buddy, it’s a big world out there.”

One afternoon, a school staff member caught a glimpse of the lanky cabbie and asked Sean about the time they spent together. It took a minute or two for the boy to respond with carefully chosen words:

“It’s not without its rewards.”