Not the Worst Thing I Have Done, But Close

I must admit that I have not always been the beacon of special needs advocacy that you now know and love.  True I have always had a soft spot for those with special needs.  I have also always respected those that struggle alongside the special needs population so it should come as no surprise that I fell in love with my wife and shortly there after with fatherhood and parenting a child with special needs.

But as I previously mentioned, these skills needed to be honed.  In my defense, my heart was in the right place, even if my head was lodged squarely in my ass.

Enter Prince.

Not that one

I have roughly 15 years of food service experience.  In that time I can tell you that there are several types of individuals that seem to gravitate to different fields of the food service industry.  Those that are very personable and organized, (and occasionally gay) seem to become servers.  Individuals that have criminal records tend to work in the kitchen.  Psychopaths tend toward management.  Prince was a dishwasher.

Dishwashers are usually one or several of the following; alcoholic, special needs, teenagers, migrant workers.

Prince is an African American gentleman from Louisiana.  He has a thick accent, a fairly oddly shaped head, and worked as a dishwasher.  Prince and his brother Kenny both worked with me at a restaurant which will remain unnamed.  For months I worked with Prince but had minimal interaction with him as I was a server and we usually worked different shifts.  When I did talk to Prince he would talk about going to school.  I assumed this was a special needs school where he would work on life skills.

One day Prince came to work directly from school. Prince was wearing hospital scrubs.  It slowly began to dawn on me that if an individual with special needs works in a hospital it is not usually a position in which scrubs are necessary.  A terrible terrible feeling began to creep over me as I turned to Prince's brother (who did not have a criminal history to my knowledge) and asked, "Kenny, does your brother have a learning disability or something?" (Kenny's accent was also not nearly as thick as his brothers.)
"No? Why?"
"No reason."
I had assumed that due to Prince's oddly shaped noggin, slow manner of speech, and employment as a dishwasher, he was an individual with special needs. The following is a list of things that I ACTUALLY SAID to Prince.
"Great job busing that table buddy!"
"You mopped that floor all by yourself!"
"Wow! You carried 1,2,3,4 glasses and didn't spill a drop!"

 The horror of my situation must have been evident on my face as I uttered the words, "My god I gave him all those hugs."

Kenny (again, who does not have a criminal record) must have pieced together what I was going through and laughed the laugh that only a black guy can laugh at a white guys discomfort as I sputtered my poorly thought out reasoning for believing his brother had special needs.  Even more terrifying was the thought that Prince may have believed that I spoke to him in the manner that I did because I was racist and placating him.

Now if you can tell me how to explain to someone that you spoke to them as if they were a child, not because you are a racist, but because you thought that they were an individual with special needs, then I sir or madam will eat my hat.  Because that is a situation that is fucking impossible to navigate gracefully.

Thankfully shortly after this Prince moved on to another place of employment.  Probably one with less racist white people that treated him like a simpleton.  I don't know if Kenny (again, not a convicted felon), ever explained to his brother that I was not intentionally being an a-hole.  But that I was only accidentally being an a-hole.

The moral of the story dear reader is this; much in the way that you should never assume a woman that looks pregnant is pregnant, never assume a person has special needs until they tell you specifically that they have special needs.  Unless they are blind of course in which case you probably should err on the side of blind and not toss them anything.

In conclusion I would like to apologize to black people, those with special needs, my family, and anyone I may have inappropriately hugged.

L&P