by JULIET WATERS

After I read Ryan Knighton’s Cockeyed, his memoir of going slowly blind from about the age of 17, there were two other memoirs I wanted to send him. The first was Slackjaw, Jim Knipfel’s brilliant, black-humoured take on suffering a similar fate in the early ’80s. But then I noticed from Knighton’s acknowledgements that he’d already read it. I can’t even remember the title of the second memoir, or even the name of the author, a washed-up British pop star. But there was one anecdote that came back to me.

One night in Brazil, the former pop star was held at knifepoint by an unusually curious mugger who started asking him questions about his life back in England. “Duran, Duran?” the mugger inquired hopefully, when he said he’d been in a famous band. “No. Spandau Ballet,” the singer replied. No doubt being mugged is worse than being forced to listen to a Brazilian street thug sing his karaoke version of “True” before he lets you go. But for anyone old enough to have endured the song back when it was a ubiquitous top 10 hit, the story glows with a weird poetic justice.

Knighton tells a similar tale about almost being mugged in New Orleans. Except in his case there were two muggers and they let him off the hook when they found out he was blind. “I respect your peoples and what you got to deal with, man. We cool?” one of the muggers explained. “My people and I were cool,” Knighton remembers thinking. “The two men patted me once on the shoulder as they left, as if we were buddies, or I was a pet.” Again, being mugged is probably worse than being pitied, but for Knighton, it still burns: “Discrimination feels like discrimination, even when it’s for the best.”

Still, judging from Knighton’s musical tastes, he’d rather be let off the hook for being blind than for having a lame global hit. I’m guessing this from his opening story about his favourite uncle, Brad, bassist in a small-town B.C. bar band called Bender, from Knighton’s memories of blind slam dancing and from his opinion on emo-metal, “the marketing term for this generation’s own saccharine, power-chord enemas.”

Knighton is an angry guy. Not as angry as a Knipfel, but he doesn’t take to blindness in a way that gives the reader much comfort from his personal tragedy. At the core of both stories is the reality of what a humiliating and dangerous disability it is, particularly for people who are fiercely independent. Deaf people may have a hard time entering a conversation, but they don’t publicly trip over things, or drive into ditches as they unknowingly lose depth perception. Or run over co-workers with a forklift. And whether they want to or not, deaf people, through learning a unique language, have a ready-made community. Knighton comes from one of those Canadian working-class suburbs where there’s no place for someone who can’t drive, let alone someone who can’t see. And he’s not the kind of person interested in hanging out with people just because they’re blind. Blind camp, which he tries out later in life, is a bust.

At the same time, if you’re blessed with a decent sense of humour, you can do something with the unavoidable slapstick subplot that blindness forces on your life. Knighton’s good at this. He’s not afraid of the dark. There are some difficult and depressing stories in here, but he’s also not as afraid of the light as Knipfel sometimes is. It’s a difficult challenge using humour as a stick to prod the dangerous areas. It’s a fine balance making sure the stick doesn’t become a schtick. Too much balance, however, and this would be just one more soulless formula story of personal triumph. Knighton’s artistic vision is fortunately too acute for that to happen.

Cockeyed by Ryan Knighton, Penguin Canada, pb, 263pp, $25