ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, August 4, 1996 TAG: 9608020060
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BETH MACY STAFF WRITER
Bobby Taylor still brags about his work.
He brags about the time his seventh-grade guidance counselor, acknowledging Taylor's third-grade reading level and failing report card, wrote on his drop-out papers: ``The best thing for Bobby to do is to get to work.''
He worked the grill at Burger King for a while, then at 16 went to work for his father, a supervisor at a Roanoke textile factory. His father, for whom he is named, had both lung cancer and a brain tumor at the time but nonetheless kept working, refusing to file for disability.
He died when Bobby was 17.
``I have always loved work. I was good at it, too,'' Bobby says, bouncing his leg against the kitchen table of his Rocky Mount home. ``Even now I'm not lazy, I can't sit still.
``I'm up at 5 in the morning and I'm ready to go.''
Bobby Taylor is remarkable in many ways.
Two years ago, he went from being illiterate to computer-literate.
Nine years ago, he went from being a jailhouse inmate to a jailhouse worker.
He is alive today, which in itself is remarkable, considering he was given less than a 1 percent chance of surviving a 10,000-volt electric shock, which resulted in the amputation of both arms.
This is a story about 32-year-old Robert Taylor III, whose life now is far from perfect.
This is a story about the one addiction in his life that has both saved and devastated him, and may one day save him again:
Work.
He has flipped burgers, dug water lines, installed pipes, worked on air-conditioning units, planted flowers, painted houses. Even in his teens and early 20s when he was doing drugs, he says, ``I always went to work on time and got the job done.''
His mother, Iris Taylor, remembers posting bond for her son in 1983 when he assaulted someone over drugs. He'd been involved with drugs since he was 13 - the same time he dropped out of school.
In 1984, he was arrested again, this time for punching a stranger in downtown Roanoke - to steal $50 - earning him an eight-year jail sentence.
Iris Taylor wasn't surprised when it soon emerged that Bobby was then-Sheriff Norman Sprinkle's No. 1 inmate at the Botetourt County Jail in Fincastle. ``People have always been amazed by his work,'' she says. ``And he's never had trouble making friends.''
Sprinkle and other county employees went the distance for Bobby, making sure he wasn't shipped from the Fincastle jail to a larger facility, supporting him at his parole hearing after just three years and guaranteeing him a maintenance job with the county when he got out. The sheriff and his wife, Glenna Sprinkle, even asked Bobby to live with them, which he did for more than three years.
``He was probably the best trustee the county ever had,'' recalls Paige Ware, head of the Botetourt County library, where Taylor occasionally worked both before and after incarceration. ``He was great with the flowerbeds,'' Ware recalls. ``He had a real green thumb.
``When it came time for him to get out of jail, the whole county rallied around him.''
Ware never knew that Bobby couldn't read. He hid the disability in Botetourt like he did at every other job. He memorized things. He had friends or family members help with applications and reports.
What happened the morning of Aug. 8, 1989, would have been tragic for anyone. But for Bobby, whose every paycheck had been earned through sweat labor, it was devastating.
He was painting the second story of his old home: the Fincastle jail. His roller extension hit a live wire, sending 10,000 volts of electricity through his body. He fell 32 feet to the ground.
His stomach was literally on fire. In the ambulance, his heart stopped five times. His ribs were broken from the CPR. His spleen, bleeding from the fall, had to be removed. His brain was swollen. And blood poisoning was creeping from his fingers up into his arms.
Bobby doesn't remember much of the four months he spent in the hospital. ``I was in loo-loo land,'' he says. But his mother recalls every horrifying detail.
``The doctors said either thing should have killed him, the fall or the electricity,'' she says. ``At the time even the insurance people said no problem, they'd pay for everything - they didn't expect him to live.''
Two weeks later, he was still unconscious. His mother remembers signing the consent forms for the surgeries, approving the amputation of her son's arms. ``It was his life or his arms,'' she says.
She recalls the lunchtime in October when she walked into his hospital room, not knowing he had just awakened for the first time. No one knew what to expect.``The nurse said, `Bobby, this is your mother.'
``And he said, `I realize that.'''
Iris was walking on air. But she soon discovered that Bobby didn't realize his limbs were gone. ``For a week he'd point and gesture at things. It was like he didn't notice they were gone. Or he just denied it.''
The family didn't bring it up, letting Bobby come to the reality in his own time. A week later, Iris was getting a cup of coffee when her daughter came running down the hall, shouting: ``Bobby's realized he doesn't have his arms.''
``I ran back to the room and he was crying. I had to keep explaining to him what had happened, and he kept denying it.''
The denial continued for weeks, then months. The family pushed for counseling, but Bobby wouldn't allow it. ``He said if someone had walked in without two arms, maybe.''
Then came the waves of phantom pains in the missing limbs. ``It felt like my fingers were fighting each other,'' Bobby recalls. ``Sometimes my stump would jiggle, and I'd have to tap it to get it to stop.''
Meanwhile, family members took turns feeding him and hired around-the-clock sitters. He refused to let any of the hospital staff touch his food.
``He has always been stubborn,'' his mother says. ``It's hurt him a lot over the years, but it's probably what saved him, too. Bobby and I have always been real close - he tells me `I love you' every time we talk on the phone.
``But I have never been able to keep him from doing what he wanted to do. Nobody can.''
One morning after he'd come home from the hospital, Iris awoke to find Bobby sitting at her kitchen table. He'd reheated day-old coffee in the microwave - somehow, he wouldn't say. And he'd attached a cigarette with a clip apparatus to the stump of his arm.
It was Dec. 23, four months after the fall. He'd wanted his prostheses in time for Christmas, but they hadn't yet come in. ``And he was determined he was going to do everything anyway.
``I kept asking him how he fixed the coffee and all he'd say is, `I did it.' He just goes on, like nothing matters.''
The loss of her son's arms still grieves her. Some mornings she wakes up and rubs the sleep out of her eyes, and it hits her: Bobby can't do that. |n n| Because he was injured on the job, Bobby received workers compensation. But his insurance company had begun to question many of his treatments. In 1990, he hired Roanoke lawyer Gary Lumsden to help negotiate his coverage through legal means.
But the issues weren't just medical. ``He was literally a psychiatric basket case when we first got him,'' Lumsden says. More than a dozen doctors had treated Bobby's physical problems, but no one had addressed his emotions.
A year after the accident, Bobby returned to maintenance work for Botetourt County, but the labor proved to be too hard on his prostheses; the bills to repair them, too expensive. Combined with an absentee problem because of bursitis - and word that he was getting involved again in drugs - he was fired two years later.
Because he couldn't read, Bobby had no way to occupy himself, Lumsden recalls. ``He couldn't read, write or do math, and none of that had been addressed.
``As a consequence, he was volatile. When Bobby got mad, [a prosthesis] got broken, and when you have $30,000 worth of prosthetic devices, that's not a minor event.''
Meanwhile, his insurer fought coverage for the hip replacements he needed because of the fall. The possibility of also losing his mobility terrified him.
His family life was a mess. His wife, Julie, was pregnant with their first child when Bobby began smoking crack, spending $300 a week on the drug. Bobby's wife and mother swore out a temporary detaining order against him. He was taken to the rehab facility at Catawba Hospital, where he spent a month.
Although he beat the crack addition, the depression lingered. A year later he checked himself into Lewis-Gale Psychiatric Center after attempting suicide with an overdose of his seizure medication.
According to a psychiatric report written soon after: ``Bobby fears one day being in a wheelchair and views that as being totally incapacitated. He has always been a very active person and has gained his sense of self-worth from hard work.
``The work ethic has been very strong in his family, and that has been their main value system.''
Lumsden was able to get the insurer to cover both counseling and literacy tutoring. "Once he got psychiatric treatment, there was an appreciable dip in repairs," the lawyer explained. In May Bobby settled with his insurance company, a move that will guarantee the family's financial security.
Learning consultant Carolyn Goodspeed, Bobby's reading tutor, is still astounded by the severity of his case: A learning disability prevents him from holding pictures of words in his mind; an attention deficit problem makes it hard for him to concentrate for any length of time; and the prostheses prevent him from writing little more than his name.
``He has never sat down and watched a whole movie,'' Goodspeed says. When she met Bobby, the only words he knew were the ones he'd memorized by rote: Kroger, Phar-Mor, stop.
Convinced he would never be able to read, Bobby was unmotivated - until Goodspeed introduced him to the computer. Using his prosthetic thumbs to type, she taught him computer games, puzzles and exercises to help him connect letters with sounds. The spell-check function helped correct his spelling. And all the technological bells and whistles helped maintain his interest.
``Workbooks would have never cut it with him,'' Goodspeed says. Soon after his insurer bought him a home computer, Bobby was sending e-mail, cruising the Internet and regularly sending faxes to his attorney.
The spellings were often wrong, the sentence construction painfully slow. But for the first time in his life, Bobby actually believed he could learn to read.
While Bobby downplays his reading skills - ``I'm not ready to go to college,'' he says - Goodspeed says he's progressed to a middle-school reading level. ``He knows more about the computer than I do,'' she says.
``They told him in the seventh grade he'd never be able to read, and that is just ridiculous.''
Jackie Wilkerson, his therapist, agrees. ``The main challenge was - and still is - getting him to realize what a good mind he has,'' she says.
The key now is for Bobby to reclaim the feeling of usefulness, she adds, by working his mind instead of his muscles. |n n| When Bobby's 2-year-old needs her diaper changed, he uses his teeth to pull the tape that holds it together.
When it's time to mow the grass, he straps on his hooks.
A weed-eater doesn't give him any trouble. Nor does a snow shovel, a needle and thread, or a rack of pool balls waiting to be broken.
Bobby Taylor is inventive when it comes to figuring things out. Tired of wearing sweat pants, he devised a way to maneuver a zipper up and down - attaching a paper clip to the pull.
He does the family's laundry, testing for dryness by holding the clothes to his face.
He drives a customized van, using a knob to help him steer.
Two things that challenge him are pouring a gallon of milk and slicing a tomato. But he can do those things, make no mistake.
Bobby plays pool in his basement rec room, where he also keeps his collection of 650-plus cigarette lighters. The quest for the perfect lighter was borne of necessity when Bobby realized he could no longer operate a Bic.
Now he and Julie spend Saturdays scouring yard sales and flea markets looking for the collectibles, which they display in glass cupboards.
His lighter of preference? A Zippo. He knocks it against the inner plastic of his arm to flick on the flame.
Bobby regularly buys his 4-year-old son Robert computer games. He likes to brag about how quickly the boy catches on; how he knew his ABCs before he was 2.
One time Robert found a picture of his dad, pre-accident, and ran up to him shouting: ``Daddy, you did have arms!''
``He used to ask me, `Daddy, when you get bigger, will you get your arms back?'
``He's confused,'' Bobby says. ``And, well, I am, too.''
While Bobby's day typically includes household chores, an occasional medical appointment in Roanoke and some time on the computer, his wife, Julie, works as a neon-maker at Hodges Sign Co. in Roanoke. Her going to work while he stays home has created tension in their marriage, Julie concedes.
``It makes him depressed being home all day,'' Julie says. ``He's so full of life and energy, he just needs something to do that would give him confidence.''
Without work, Bobby routinely resorts to overly physical activities to pass the time, such as mowing and weed-eating - even though doctors have repeatedly told him it strains his hips. Bobby's body likely will be able to withstand one more hip replacement. After that, he'll need a wheelchair.
He's weighed both sides of the issue, he says, and the answer's always the same: ``I like to sweat. It's worth it to me to work. I mean, what else can I do?''
He's considering keeping the kids at home, instead of sending them to a baby sitter. But those close to him say he needs more.
Volunteering in the hospitals has been suggested. So has working with other adults struggling to become literate.
``He needs what we all need: to have a purpose,'' says Goodspeed, his tutor. ``What he's gone through, if he could funnel that into a way to help people - and also give himself something to do every day - that's really the key.''
``He could be a big help to other amputees,'' says his mother Iris Taylor. ``If he can find something to do, I wouldn't really worry.''
Seeing her only son in a wheelchair isn't something she looks forward to.
``All I can say is, it better be a fast one.''
LENGTH: Long : 259 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: 1. DON PETERSEN STAFF Despite a multitude of roadblocksby CNB- from jail to physical disability - Bobby Taylor has always stayed
busy. color
2. DON PETERSEN STAFF Taylor and his wife, Julie, have two children,
2-year-old Haily (left) and 4-year-old Robert. color
3. Bobby and his mother are pictured at his sister's wedding in the
photograph at right. ``Bobby and I have always been real close,''
his mom says. ``He tells me `I love you' every time we talk on the
phone.'' color Dourtesy of the Taylor family.
4. A teen-age Bobby Taylor at Virginia Beach in 1977. ``He has
always been stubborn,'' says his mother. ``It's hurt him a lot over
the years, but it's probably what saved him, too.''Courtesy of the
Taylor family KEYWORDS: PROFILE