The Wheelchair Is On the Plate

 I ride a motorcycle. I park in handicapped spots. I'm legally entitled to both. Here's what the people who appoint themselves parking cops get wrong.

Almost every time I park, a stranger decides they're law enforcement.

I pull my motorcycle into a handicapped spot — the one I'm legally entitled to — kill the engine, and before I've even got my cane off the bike, here comes the volunteer: "You can't park there. That's handicapped." Always with that little hit of righteousness people get when they think they've caught someone.

Here's the part they never check: the wheelchair symbol is right there. On the plate. The State of New Mexico put it there, because I qualify. I have a handicapped motorcycle plate — one of the perks, I joke, of dying and needing oxygen.

Because that's the reality the bike hides. I have pulmonary fibrosis and bronchiectasis. I'm on oxygen. I'm supposed to use a cane. I am, in the plainest sense of the word, dying. None of that shows from across a parking lot when all you see is a guy on a motorcycle — so people fill the gap with an assumption, and the assumption is always the same: that I'm a cheat.

That's the tax on invisible disability. You don't just carry the illness. You carry everyone who decided, on sight, that you're faking it. A motorcycle reads as "able-bodied" to people who never learned that disability isn't wheelchair-or-nothing. So I get to prove, in parking lot after parking lot, that I'm sick enough to deserve a spot I already qualified for.

When it's a random stranger, it's exhausting. When it's a security guard, it's a violation — because now someone with a uniform and no actual authority is harassing a disabled person over a disability he couldn't be bothered to verify. So I tell them, flat: walk over to the bike. Look at the plate. See the wheelchair. Then go report it to management — that's where I'll be, filing a discrimination complaint. I've filed them before. I'll file them again. A guard who won't take ten steps to read a plate before accusing a dying man has told you precisely how much care he brings to the rest of the job.

None of this is hard. The information is on the plate. Look before you accuse. If you're not a police officer — and you are not — you have no standing to demand a stranger's medical history in a parking lot. And if you're too lazy to read six inches of license plate before you open your mouth, the problem was never my motorcycle.

I'm not asking for sympathy. I earned this spot the hard way; I'd give anything not to qualify. I'm asking for the bare minimum: don't presume a dying man is a liar because his disability arrived on two wheels instead of four.

The wheelchair is on the plate. Read it.