A special ed bus ride to enlightenment

A short bus is what school kids with disabilities call the vehicle used to transport them to special education programs. It’s also “a symbol of difference and disability in our culture,” author Jonathan Mooney explains in his new book. For him and others he writes about in “The Short Bus: A Journey Beyond Normal,” riding it “was not a pervasive physical reality but a symbol of oppressive experience.”

Mooney was diagnosed with dyslexia in third grade. When his mother met with his teachers, she suggested that maybe the school environment was the problem, not Jonathan. They suggested that she take a parenting class. And he was labeled LD (learning disabled), placed in special ed classes and forced to ride the “short bus” to school. In sixth grade, Mooney writes, he was faking reading. In high school, a guidance counselor gave him a 50-50 chance of graduating.

Yet Mooney went on to graduate from Brown University in 2000 with an honors degree in English and he became president of Project Eye-to-Eye, a nonprofit mentoring and advocacy organization for students with learning disabilities. It wasn’t easy. Brown began to realize that he’d spent too much of his childhood striving to be “normal.” He remembers thinking at age 12 “of all of the parts of myself that I was ashamed of, that I thought didn’t fit: I talked too fast, cursed, couldn’t spell, couldn’t sit still, mispronounced words, and interrupted people.”

Mooney describes suffering countless humiliations from teachers and fellow students. He is repeatedly punished and reminded again and again not to strive for too much, to acknowledge his shortcomings and to fear his own creativity. But at college, he experiences what he calls “an explosion” in his thinking about himself: “an explosion of ideas about disability, an explosion [in] how others saw me.... In two years at Brown I went from the learning disabled closet, from the stupid athlete who was arrested for a DUI and was close to suicide, to becoming a published Ivy League Truman scholar.” He decides to use his savings to purchase a short bus and drive around the country, visiting disabled children he has met or corresponded with over the years. His mission is to try to recover what he lost in the struggle to be normal. When he first steps into the bus (nicknamed Bob Henry after a street sage he meets), it smells like school and he feels “a mixture of fear and shame.” This is the visceral level he writes from, and it is powerful.

Along the way, Mooney writes about the many kinds of disabilities, the history of their discovery and some of the ways they are handled in our culture, particularly in the schools. “Many good research studies using brain imaging do show that LD and dyslexic brains do have a different structure than so-called normal brains,” he explains. “Often the brains of people like ... me have smaller left hemispheres than most.... However, the way we interpret this structure makes all the difference.... These neurological differences are not inherently problematic or pathological.”

Mooney also visits conceptual artists across the country (as well as the Museum of Wonder in Seale, Ala., which features a blind chicken named Bob Ross that is billed as “telepathic”) and is struck by how often they, like children with disabilities, stand on a line “between fool and sage, between fame and alienation.”

Visiting his friend Kent, a performance artist and writer for the Onion who was diagnosed in childhood with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, Mooney admires the way Kent has straddled that line, without flinching or running away. “He stands on that line and smiles.”

Mooney visits kids with ADHD, Down’s syndrome, Asperger’s disorder and other learning disabilities. Because he hasn’t forgotten what he lived through as a child and a young adult, he is able to talk with them like an equal, like a friend. Even so, in each case, it takes the author hours or days to really see them and what he calls their “humanity.” He documents this process with honesty and clarity. It leads a reader to wonder if Mooney, who shares their experience, has such a hard time seeing their true selves, can the rest of us -- teachers, friends and strangers -- ever truly appreciate their struggles and allow them to be who they are?

“Fear of the other is a powerful thing,” Mooney writes, and it is true. But there can be no question, after he is done with his tour -- that abandoning this fear is a mind and heart-stretching exercise. The kids are unforgettable.

Mooney, co-author of the 2000 book “Learning Outside the Lines,” also makes it clear that different social environments, relaxed, accepting and supportive instead of oppressive and judgmental, can make all the difference.

There is a moment when his bus is parked and a young man with Down’s syndrome approaches with enormous fear, thinking that he’s going to be forced to get inside and go to school. “Are you here to take me away?” the young man asks. After telling the man, “No,” Mooney turns to his traveling companion, 15-year-old Miles from Los Angeles. “You know, sometimes I think they are still coming for me.” Miles nods and says, “But they aren’t anymore, right?” Mooney answers, “Maybe we’re coming for them.”

What makes this journey so inspiring is Mooney’s transcendent humor; the self he has become does not turn away from old pain but can laugh at it, make fun of it, make it into something beautiful.

susan.reynolds@latimes.com