a brief chat about joystick-controlled minivans and Britney Spears

and old ladies at the grocery store, too

Sometimes we do mailbags around here. Sometimes I forget to ask for emails and we don’t do them for months. (Whoops.) And sometimes I get an email that really doesn’t fit inside a regular mailbag because I want to respond to it with multiple paragraphs and make it a whole thing. That’s what’s happening here. A while back, I received this email from a reader named Nolan…

I know you've written/talked about having an accessible minivan you use and I was talking to my dad about it a few weeks back. He also has a spinal cord injury and is a power wheelchair user. His driving days are behind him, but he is still very much a car guy and tech guy and was asking more about how it worked - but aside from remembering you said you operate it via a joystick, I couldn't offer much more information to him. I told him I'd ask next time a mailbag came around, so here I am! Hopefully other readers might find it interesting as well, if you chose to answer.

… which was cool. Thank you, Nolan. And hi to Nolan’s dad. I never mind talking about this kind of stuff. I try not to jam it into everything I write just because I feel more comfortable being “a funny blogger who happens to be disabled” than being “a disabled blogger who happens to be funny,” but I do like writing about it when the situation feels right. Especially when it’s something I think can be interesting or useful or funny to people who are dealing with something similar or people who might never have seen something from this perspective. Like the time I bonked my wheelchair into a mannequin in the mall last Christmas and everyone freaked out. That was great. 

So this is gonna be a big thing about my van. I think it will be helpful to hit a few notes before we dive in, though…

• Background for people who are new here: I have a spinal cord injury as a result of a fall way back in college like 20 years ago and I use a power wheelchair and only really have semi-functional use of my right arm and hand

• I will be describing car things in very general and possibly incorrect terms because anything that happens under the hood might as well be sorcery to me

• If any of this is unclear or you have a follow-up question, feel free to jump into the comments below and I’ll try to respond 

Okay, here we go. Let’s do this in sections, just because that will make it easier for me to lay it all out. Five sections feels right. Let’s go with five. 

ONE: RAMPS AND STUFF

This is what my van looks like from the outside when I open the side door and the ramp shoots out. As you can see, the middle row of seats is out so I have room to drive my chair up and in and spin around a little. The driver’s seat is taken out, too, so I can pull my chair right up to the wheel and operate the various gizmos we’ll discuss in a minute. 

The inside where I pull in looks like this…

… which is worth noting for two reasons:

— That silver box on the floor is what locks my chair into position so I don’t go sliding around every time I whip through a corner. My chair has a little pin underneath it that grabs the base and clicks in and keeps me in there super tight until I push a button to release it. 

— The seat belt is buckled and set up like that so it’s in place when I pull in, only because I wouldn’t be able to buckle and unbuckle it on my own. You might be thinking here “But Brian, why do you need the seatbelt if you’re locked into this sucker with a big metal box?” Well, that’s what I thought, too, until the driving instructor reminded me that the chest strap is what keeps me from bonking my forehead on the steering wheel every time I smash the brakes. Forehead bonking is bad. We try to avoid it. 

This is also where I should pause briefly to say somethiHEY DON’T PARK THERE, DUMMY. NEXT TO ME. WHERE MY RAMP COMES OUT. IN THAT LITTLE AREA MARKED OFF ON THE GROUND WITH BLUE OR YELLOW LINES. I CAN’T GET MY RAMP OUT IF YOU DO. WHICH IS ANNOYING. EVEN IF YOU ARE “JUST RUNNING IN” OR “THE OTHER SPOTS ARE SO FAR AWAY.” KNOCK IT OFF. 

Okay, that felt good. Apologies for shouting. But I will call to have you towed if it comes to it. Let’s go ahead and call this your warning. 

TWO: SORRY FOR HONKING

This is my view from the driver’s seat. That’s the joystick and screen I use to control everything in the van. You can see the little key on the screen in the middle that I push to turn the engine on and off. The other buttons on the Home Screen are your basic shifting options: park, drive, neutral, reverse, etc. But I can cycle through other options in there to control other parts of the car, too. There’s a screen for the temperature control and a screen to put the windows up and down and a screen for the wipers and a screen for the ramp and a lot of other stuff. The only thing I can’t operate from there is the radio. I have to use the regular touchscreen on the dashboard the same way you do in your car. This leads to some really funny situations we’ll discuss later on. Anyway, here’s a closer view of everything.

There’s also a screen where I can operate the turn signals, but those are hard to get to while I’m using my one functional hand to steer. That’s why I have that little blue button underneath the screen, behind the joystick. I can press my knuckle against it while I’m driving and it cycles through various commands. Holding it for one second activates the left turn signal and holding it for two seconds activates the right. The funniest part is that holding it for three seconds makes the horn honk, so if I just wanna make a right at an intersection but don’t let go in time, the person in the car in front of me thinks I’m being an impatient prick. This happens maybe once a month and it cracks me up every time. 

The joystick is cool. It operates mostly like any video game. Forward is gas, back is brakes, etc. It’s really touchy, though, which can be interesting when I’m starting or stopping on a steep hill. (Screeeeech.) Where it gets weird is the turning. That whole box tilts side to side when I move it left or right, kind of like the joystick of a fighter plane. Also, for reasons I do not understand, the steering wheel itself still turns when I rotate the joystick, even though I’m not touching it, which makes it look like a ghost is controlling the car. This always freaks out people in the passenger seat. It also cracks me up every time. 

THREE: WHEELCHAIR TOP GUN

It did take a while to learn how to operate everything. There are a few different kinds of driver systems and all of them need to be modified and tweaked to work for everyone’s specific disability and there’s just really a lot of trial and error involved. I actually had to go to this specialized driver training school for two weeks to figure it all out. The first few days were spent just doing circles in a parking lot with the instructor in the passenger seat, looping and looping and sometimes running over a cone or two. It was extremely boring. But necessary. Like a lot of boring things are. I got kind of punchy and started calling the whole process “Wheelchair Top Gun” because of the joystick and the training and the thing where I had probably watched Top Gun on cable before I went out there. I do not think the instructor appreciated it. 

At the end of the two weeks, I had to take the whole driver’s test again at the DMV. That was stressful. Think about how nervous you were taking the driver’s test when you were a teenager and then imagine you had just learned to parallel park using a touchy joystick two days earlier and then imagine a DMV employee in the car with you trying desperately to be normal about an objectively odd situation.

But we did it, baby. 

FOUR: FRENCH FRIES DOWN

Some things I still can’t do even with all the modifications:

• Use a drive-thru window (left arm isn’t strong enough to be functional so any attempted handoff would result in a tragic amount of French fries on the ground)

• Pump gas (always have to go inside and have Wawa send out a dude in a reflective vest to pump it for me like I’m single-handedly bringing back full-service gas stations)

• Adjust the music while the car is moving (probablyyyyyy shouldn’t take my hand off the thing that controls both my brakes and wheels to reach for the dashboard)

This last one brings us to the thing I mentioned earlier…

FIVE: SHOUTOUT TO BRITNEY

Okay. Look. I play my music loud when I’m driving by myself. Always have, dating back to when I was an able-bodied snotty teen who played rap music in his suburban development. I still play rap music in the suburbs sometimes. It leads to some really great reactions from people. Like, I’ll pull into Wegmans and park in a handicappedd spot next to some older lady and I’ll see her give me that stink look that older ladies at Wegmans give to people who blast rap music in the parking lot, but then I’ll spit out the ramp and roll out in my chair and smile at her and watch as her facial expression rolls from contempt (“Who is this jerk?”) to confusion (“Did… he drive that himself?”) to admiration (“What an impressive young man!”). It’s great. Picture the Alonzo Mourning GIF but the face is a 75-year-old country club lady who just finished grocery shopping at noon on a Saturday. Maybe my favorite thing. 

There’s a flip side to that, though. Remember how I said I can’t take my hand off the joystick to mess with the music when I’m driving? And the thing I just said about listening to it loud? Wellllll this can result in some weird situations. Like, to choose one example, the time various streaming algorithms decided I wanted to hear “Tiny Dancer” by Elton John — great song, no disrespect, could sing it all right now from memory — just as I pulled into a crowded parking garage. Please stop here and imagine how you would react if you saw (and heard) a man absolutely blasting all six minutes of that song off the concrete walls of a cavernous parking garage as he crept from level to level in search of a parking spot. People were staring. I found this funny, too. 

My favorite example of this just happened recently. I’ve been going to physical therapy the last few months to work on some core strength. The facility is like five minutes down the street, which is convenient, and such a short ride that I just leave the radio on instead of setting up a whole playlist. The station I have on usually plays current pop hits, your Ariana Grandes and Sabrina Carpenters, but every now and then dips way back into the 90s for a throwback. This seems to happen a lot around 2:30 or 3pm, right as I’m on my way to my appointment. Which, again, fine. Lord knows I do love an occasional 90s bop. 

But…

Two different times now, both in the past few weeks, the station played “Baby One More Time” by Britney Spears right as I was pulling into the parking lot, and both times I saw the same lady sitting outside on a bench waiting for her ride home, which means there’s a non-zero chance there’s now a lady in my area who thinks there’s a man in a power wheelchair who drives a minivan with a joystick and blasts Britney Spears at max volume on purpose every day on the way to physical therapy to pump himself up for the rigorous workout ahead. 

Part of me wants to explain all of this to her the next time I see her sitting out there. A bigger part of me just wants to let that mystery bang around her head for the rest of her life. A little treat for both of us, really.