LITTLE ROCK — The stuff in this room - like the 21 swimming medals that hang from a 4-foot MVP soccertournament trophy - is a remnant from the days when Eric Young was whole but not complete.
As evidence of his whole self, Eric hands me a 1995 photograph made three months before the wreck.
He is standing on a Florida beach, a sun-toasted Aeropostale-Abercrombie man, ribbed abs and chiseled chest rising from a sapling waist.
In another photo, Eric has obscured the left edge so that his 4-year-old son can’t see the can of beer in his daddy’s hand.
For Eric, the difference between whole and complete is the difference between drunk and sober.
Had Eric not drunk himself stupid that night in July 1995 - his blood-alcohol level was 0.22 - maybe today he would walk like he did in spring-break days. But the whole man on the beach might have walked right past completeness, whose name is Shasta.
I met Eric at the North Little Rock Lowe’s, where he peddles ball valves and quarter-inch brass pipe, which is what Eric grabbed for me.
Eric’s left side is paralyzed, but he walks without aid, an improvement doctors declared impossible after their incorrect prediction that Eric wouldn’t survive the crash of his 1985 Porsche into a tree in Burns Park.
You have to listen fast when Eric talks, his words a torrent that travels at the speed typical of a brain injury. And mixed into that torrent, Eric piles cockamamie upon cockamamie: “Iwasaneuro surgeonmaking500000doll arsayearuntilthewreck,” he told me the night we met.
Cockamamie. Eric never was a neurosurgeon, and he never pulled down $500,000.
He doesn’t slow down when he speaks of Shasta, but dispenses with the cockamamie.
“She is my soul mate,” Eric said and pulled a photograph out of his billfold. “This is the woman I’ve been looking for my whole life.”
He met Shasta through her father and her uncle, customers on his plumbing aisle, a profession he might not have chosen had he remained whole.
Shasta is a Lonoke beauty, with fine lightbrown hair that hangs straight. Her eyes morph from soft to eyes of fairytale love every time she turns them on this man whose left arm wants to curl in on itself.
Their romance and her adoration are remarkable in at least this way: Ten years after his wreck, Shasta married Eric for better or for worse with a clear image of how worse looks.
“He was,” Shasta says of the man who professes that his life wasn’t complete without her, “my first everything.”
Arkansas, Pages 15 on 09/26/2010