Mormon Folklore

We recently passed what would have been the 36th birthday of my best friend growing up. His name was Kevin and he passed away a few years ago. When I heard the news, I sat and wrote as many stories as I could remember. Those narratives live with me now — they have tremendous power and are of great value to me. They are a part of my personal folklore.

I am sure that each of you have narratives of family or friends that are powerful and valuable to you — narratives that keep you connected in ways that nothing else can. I want to share some of my narratives with you here in this tribute to my dear friend. It’s a bit of a read, but I hope you will enjoy it.

* * * * * * * * * *
I must have been eleven years old when I first heard that a new family was moving into our neighborhood. Ours was a relatively new neighborhood, and new families coming in was not such a big deal. But this family was building a house like a castle, and it was gonna have an elevator. When you’re eleven years old, a house with an elevator is pretty darn cool. But the reason they needed the elevator, I was told, was because they had a young boy about my age who was “crippled” and in a wheelchair. He would be needing friends, I was told. Maybe I could be his friend. And this was how I was first pointed in the direction of the young, crippled, Kevin Sparks.

I have to laugh when I think back on my eleven-year-old vision of this sad, meek, humble boy in a wheelchair. I expected Tiny Tim. I remember walking through the house as it was being built. We were on the top floor, the second story, standing midway along the walkway from the stairs to the master suite at a little semi-circular platform that overlooked what would eventually be the living room below. I recall my parents wondering why the hallway puckered out into the platform as it did. I said, “It is probably for the boy in the wheelchair to sit and look down at the Christmas tree,” and in my mind I could see him: Christmas morning, so sad and forlorned, gazing down at his healthy brothers and sisters ripping into to their healthy-kid presents. This poor boy would need a friend. I, yes I would deign to be that friend.

I had visions of my befriending Kevin becoming an article in the LDS Friend magazine – you know, one of those stories where the good humble Christ-like lad generously befriends a needy, shunned member of society, brings a ray of sunshine to his otherwise bleak existence, and changes the course of his once pathetic life forever. I was prepared to be that sunshine. I was expecting Kevin to be very sweet, timid, and shy, and expecting to receive some kind of gold medal – or at the very least some serious bonus points in heaven – for sacrificing my ability to run and play with other kids to spend time playing chess or backgammon with this crippled kid in need. Boy, was I in for the shock of my life!

I could tell Kevin was different from what I had expected the first day we met. Rather than being eager, flattered, and appreciative that a healthy kid like me would befriend a needy kid like him, he was cautious, guarded, and more than a little suspicious. He could probably smell my noble-intentions a mile away! We went out for a tour of the neighborhood, and it didn’t take long for me to figure out this kid was far from meek or mild.

I introduced him to my neighbor across the street, Jeff Hickey, and Kevin caught his first glimpse of Jeff’s older sister, Lori. Let’s just say that Kevin liked what he saw. I recall on our way home passing by their backyard. I looked over the fence and said, “Wow. You should see Lori. She’s laying out by the pool in a bikini!” She wasn’t really, but I figured that confined to his chair as he was, he would never know. So much for noble intentions, right? This was the day, however, that I first discovered how very un-handicapped Kevin really was! He hopped out of his chair like there was no tomorrow and began scaling the wall arm over arm, gripping the horse-trail railings and anything else he could get a hold of until finally pulling himself up to see for his own two eyes that I’d been lying.

I, of course, was terrified. A new headline from the Friend magazine popped into my mind: “Crippled Boy Falls From Fence while Deceitful Friend Stands By Laughing.” And just as easily as he climbed up, he climbed back down, wheeled over to where I was standing, and slugged me soundly in the arm. I knew then and there that this “crippled” kid was tough. I also knew that we would go on to become very good friends.

Deceit became somewhat of a theme for us. We loved pulling pranks, and stopped at no opportunity to pull the wool over someone’s eyes. One day we invited all of the younger neighborhood kids to my house for a free magic show. We performed a few silly tricks until it was time for the grand finale. We had arranged the chairs in my garage in a particular order and assigned the kids their different seats. We made certain that Wes Lueck was sitting directly beneath the garage door, or perhaps I should say directly beneath the bucket of water we had rested on the top edge of the garage door. As I stood before the kids, I held out my hands – nothing up my sleeve, and PRESTO! I said the magic words. This was Kevin’s cue to shift his weight onto the garage door opener he was sitting on. The door moved down, and the bucket fell off the edge – only not as we had planned. We had only wanted to splash Wes, but the bucket didn’t tip. It just fell. And it fell, bottom first, right on top of Wes’s head. OUCH! There were some pretty good reasons why Wes didn’t like me very much growing up, and “presto change-o, bonk Wessy in the head-o” was one of them.

When we were Teachers, we would collect fast offerings in a little mini-car I had inherited from my Uncle. I would drive it through the neighborhood and Kevin would hang on from behind. That always made collections fun.

Kevin found it simultaneously annoying and amusing that when he told people he had attended Helen Keller Elementary school in Mesa, which he had, they would automatically assume it was a school for “special kids,” which it wasn’t. He made fun of his condition frequently and reveled in the discomfort it caused people around him.

Once at a high school assembly, the crowd was clapping and cheering for the Pommies. Kevin was holding his legs by the knees, waving them around all wobbly at the girls. Some who didn’t know Kevin very well were just appalled, mortified that anyone would degrade themselves this way, and in complete disbelief that any friends of his would laugh along and encourage such behavior. But Kevin loved to make others uncomfortable about his condition. It empowered him. It also gave me some nice opportunities to do the same.

We were at a Stake dance one night, and as I often did, I borrowed his wheelchair because I wanted to play a joke. My aunt was at the dance, and I had her approach this girl I had my eye on. She pointed me out to the girl and encouraged her to ask me to dance. This girl, having most probably been spoon-fed the same Friends magazine articles as I, decided she too would be a ray of sunshine for this poor – but incredibly handsome – crippled boy in the chair. So she asked me to dance and we went out onto the floor, and as we were dancing, I said to her, “I saw you talking with my aunt over there.”

“Oh, yeah. She’s nice.” As if she knew. I continued bobbing back and forth to the music in Kevin’s chair.

“She didn’t tell you to ask me to dance did she?”

“No. No, of course not.” She obviously had not read the Friend article about the octopus’s tentacles and lying. So we kept dancing and then I really lowered the boom.

“You didn’t ask me just ‘cuz I’m in a wheelchair?”

“No, no. Don’t be silly.”

“Good, ‘cuz I’ve got the biggest cramp in my left leg.” And I stood up.

And Kevin, sitting in a folding chair against the wall, praying hard that no one would approach and ask him to dance, was laughing hysterically. The girl I had insulted was not. I didn’t win too many new friends with this kind of behavior. But it didn’t matter. I had Kevin, and he thought it was funny. That was enough.

He would scoff at Political Correctness, and would ridicule phrases like “success comes in cans, not cant’s.” He laughed at people who referred to him as “handi-capable.” It was a favorite pseudo-pep-talk of mine to end our conversations with, “and remember, never let anybody tell you that you can’t, just ‘cuz you’re in a wheelchair.”

And to be completely honest, there wasn’t a whole lot that Kevin couldn’t do. We played wheelchair basketball often, but it was never really fair. He had this nice, sleek, sporty wheelchair, and I was consigned to the boxy but durable hospital clunker. He wheeled circles around me.

And no one – NO ONE – dared tackle Kevin head on in a game of football – not if they valued their shins or knee-caps. You have never seen a more terrifying fullback than Kevin Sparks staring you down, elbows out, hands clenching the ball to his lap, speeding towards you with two guys pushing full speed from behind. Olè! Touchdown! Kevin was king. And a special apology to mother Sue for all the bumps and bruises and broken bones (and hips) that he never knew he had and we never knew we were inflicting.

But Kevin could inflict pain and insult upon us just as well. When we were about 13, we went on a 50 mile scout hike called “Whiting.” For his Eagle project, one of the older boys, Thury Foster, put together a mobile cart that we used to pull Kevin every inch of the way. He rigged it up with ropes and logs tied across. We pulled the cart like mules, and Kevin relished every minute of it, throwing pine cones, shouting “HYA!” and making whipping sounds as we pulled. We repelled cliffs with him, climbed and pulled him up trees, and pull his cart like a herd of stampeding cattle.

When we weren’t camping, or terrorizing defenses, we also did a lot of bowling. Kevin would hold the ball on his lap, one of us would push him towards the pins, and then we’d stop at the edge of the lane just as he was shoving the ball forward with all his might. He was always very competitive with his scores. Sometimes he was too competitive. One time he was getting very close to beating me. I couldn’t let that happen, so when I pushed him up to the lane, I jerked his chair to a stop a bit more suddenly than he was used to, and as he was shoving the ball forward we gained some first hand experience in the laws of applied inertia. Kevin went flying, face first, the weight of the bowling ball pulling him forward. As much as you hate to do it, the site of a tougher-than-nails crippled kid flying out of his seat with a bowling ball in his hands is funny. I know it shouldn’t be, but it is.

Another time he was sitting in the back of our van without a seatbelt. I was driving, and for one reason or another, I came to a sudden stop. Once again, Kevin went flying. My little sister thought it was the funniest thing she had ever seen (still does). Kevin had a good sense of humor, and one way or another, he always got me back.

One evening after school we were messing around outside the seminary building near the church. I was sitting on the hood of his car and he decided it would be funny to start driving. He swerved around the parking lot picking up speed. I was holding on for dear life. As soon as he got to the edge of the lawn, he jerked to a sudden stop and sent me flying head first into the grass. Not to be so easily outdone, I held perfectly still for a few minutes, pretending to have suffered a concussion. This brought nothing but laughter from Kevin. I like to think it’s ‘cuz I hadn’t really fooled him, but with Kevin, you could never really tell.

He did miss one golden opportunity to get me, though. Just after Kevin’s younger brother was been born, we were hanging around his house one summer afternoon. I looked in their freezer and saw a little frozen baggy of what I thought was a homemade lime-juice popsicle. “Can we have these?” I asked. Kevin busted up. “Dude – that’s breast milk!” He later regretted revealing the true nature of the popsicle so soon. I, on the other hand, was very thankful that he had.

Another story used to make him laugh like no other. Our friend Scott was at a ward dance one night and one of his friends’ mothers asked him to dance. She was a large woman and Scott did not feel comfortable dancing with her, but he agreed. When they got out to the dance floor, however, Scott realized his dilemma. Where was he to put his hands? “So what did you do?” Kevin asked. “I just reached out with both hands, grabbed on to a roll, and held on ‘till the song was over!” Kevin split a gut.

When Kevin decided to run for Student Body President, he asked for my assistance. And just for the record, the slogan “don’t be a nipple, vote for a cripple” was NOT a contribution of mine. But he loved it. It was completely, 100% Kevin’s sense of humor. My biggest contributions to his campaign came through the posters that simply said “vote” below a picture of the handicap parking sign with Kevin’s face on it.

Kevin and I played a lot of juvenile telephone pranks as well. The Bangerters to this day have probably never ordered so many pizzas as they did when Kevin and I got together. We would make phony calls, pretending to be Dominos, confirming an order for 12 pizzas and 16 diet cokes, and they would run through the house looking to see who had called in the order, and they’d come back to say, “nobody ordered any pizzas, and no one here even drinks coke!” We would ask them to hold, put the phone up to K-Lite 99 FM for authenticity, and then come on as the “manager” explaining that the truck was on its way with a loud of pizza, that records showed that someone from their house had ordered it, and that someone was going to have to pay. That’s how we got our kicks.

We would also call people at random, and ask, “Is this suicide hotline?” We would get people on the line and bait them into talking us out of our apparent depression. A cruel trick, sure – but to our credit, we never made anyone feel that they had failed. One man said to Kevin once, “Think of all you have to live for. Take up a hobby, like soccer, or football,” to which Kevin responded, “but I’m in a wheelchair.” The man on the phone paused for a moment, “well, there’s always… archery!” Kevin and I always cracked up at that one.

My mom has a few Kevin stories as well. One day when Kevin and I were on the phone, he was more-than-usually horny (come on – he was a teenage boy). He said to me, “you know what I want to do right now? I want to spray whip cream all over some girl and then lick it off of her.” Little did either of us know that my mother had chosen that particular moment to pick up the phone. She stifled a laugh and hung up slowly. Later that night, when Kevin stopped by, she asked him to stay for dinner. “No, I got to go,” he replied. “Oh yeah, I forget,” she grinned. “You’ve got to go lick whip cream off some girl.” Kevin was speechless. It was a beautiful, beautiful moment.

As frequently happens, we went in different directions after high school. Still, I would drop him a line from time-to-time just to touch base and share some laughs, but it had been a year or two since we had last spoken. I can’t believe I no longer have that option. I wish so much that I would have called – to have spoken with him one last time – to let him know how much he means to me – to encourage him to take up a hobby, like soccer, or football, or archery. I feel very empty thinking that he is gone. Kevin was a dear friend and a big part of my life for many, many years. I’m glad at least I have these stories. They will ensure that he will always be a part of me.