Ervin: Mohican Rage


I feel enough time has passed to where I can finally write a review of the movie The Last of the Mohicans. I’ve been burning to write a review ever since I saw that movie when it came out in 1992, but every time I tried, I realized it was still too soon. The memory was just too painful.

But time and distance have given me perspective to where I can now openly discuss the emotions seeing this movie churned up in me. So here’s my review:

The Last of the Mohicans suuuuu-uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuucked! I never left a theater more angry and agitated than the night I saw it. I don’t remember much about the movie itself. Daniel Day Lewis was an American Indian with an Irish accent or something like that. He kissed his girlfriend goodbye and jumped off a cliff.

What I remember most was that the theater had no accessible seating area so my wife and I sat in the rear aisle, which meant that every time some walkie went past us in the dark, they tripped over our wheelchairs. I got so damn sick of this that I went out into the lobby and told a popcorn boy I wanted to see the manager. He pointed to the man tearing tickets at the door. The man was a sour-pussed old cuss clutching an unlit cigar with a white plastic tip in his teeth. I sped up to him and demanded my money back. He totally ignored me and kept tearing, which pissed me off to no end. So I repeated my demand louder and louder until this big mountain of a black guy stepped between us. He wore a black suit. I figured he was theater security. He ordered me to back off.

“What’re you gonna do about it if I don’t back off?” I said.

“You better not run over my foot!” he said.

“You mean like this?” I said. Then I ran over his foot. I couldn’t help it. I was pissed to the point of temporary insanity.

So then the guy grabs the push handle of my chair, flashes a badge and says I’m under arrest for assaulting a police officer.

Holy crap! I tried to just quietly exit but he yanked back on my handle until my chair popped a wheelie if I tried to drive forward. He ordered me to sit still until the paddy wagon arrived to take me to the police station.

At that point I relaxed because I knew time was on my side. The official Chicago police procedure for hauling away arrestees in wheelchairs was to call for a paratransit cripple bus, the same cripple buses that required a 24-hour advance reservation. So I laughed to myself at this guy’s assumption that a cripple bus could be dispatched on demand, even for the cops. I figured that when we were still sitting here three hours from now waiting for the cripple bus, the magnitude of his naiveté would become painfully clear to him and he would let me go.

So about 15 minutes later, the cripple bus shows up! I should have known it would work that way. The punctuality of the cripple bus was always inversely correlated to the degree of my desire to get where it was taking me. If I was waiting for a ride to an orgy, it would inevitably be three hours late. But to take me to the police station it was right on time, of course.

And then came the final kick in the crotch. At the police station, the cop booked me and told me to wait in the holding cell. And the holding cell was perfectly accessible! It had ADA-compliant door width, plenty of
turning radius, the whole damn works!

They let me go without bail. The moonlighting cop who arrested me never showed up for my court date so the charges were dropped.

So that’s why I haaaaaaaaaaaaaaa-aated The Last of the Mohicans. Seeing that movie left me with a bad case of PTSD. And I can’t believe that after all I went through that night, it still won an Oscar.


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