Stumpy Stephenson
Written by: BandE
Stumpy was born without a right hand, wrist and part of his forearm. Wasn’t his fault. His mom took thalidomide ’cause the docs said it was alright to do that. Thus, Stephen S. Stephenson [his name, really] has only the inked impression of his left hand and both feet on his birth certificate. It’s also why a fellow with such an elegant name answers to “Stumpy”.
Some folks in a situation like this would choose to be really pissed off and sullen ’cause they couldn’t get the full effect of patty cake as a kid or hammer out Heart and Soul on the piano or slip their right hand around a girl for a little feel.
But not Stumpy. No, he decided to go with the “what the hell, let’s make the best of it scenario”, and have fun while he was at it.
It all started one year just after he was fitted with a prosthesis. He’d decided to get a fake hand and arm,as he called it, to fill out his sports jacket sleeve so the right one didn’t flap in the breeze. It didn’t work or do anything, just gave the illusion that he was intact.
Around this time, his parents had been nagging him to clean the ashes out of the fireplace, and after he was finished, the thought struck him that his fake hand and arm would look funny as hell sticking out of the ash chute. He tried it and it did. Took a picture of it and passed it around to his kegger friends. They all loved it and naturally urged him to do more, which he did.
After college, the travel bug bit him and he started doing some serious backpacking. With his laid back manner and the ability to put people at ease by whipping off his arm when they least expected it, he made friends everywhere. When he was in Hawaii with some buddies, one of them started talking how he’d read about some dudes who stole their neighbor’s garden gnome and then took pictures of it in the different places they traveled to. They would then send the pics back to their neighbor with some dumb “Wish you were here.” kind of message on the back of the photo.
That’s when Stumpy started the”Surfer Series” featuring his arm and hand hanging five with Diamond Head in the background.
Over the years he would send these weird pictures to his chums. I still have one from Munich taken during Octoberfest where he shot his hand and arm sticking out from under a table holding a huge stein while the St. Pauli Girl leaned way over to get a better look. That shot can still be found today on the back walls of better foreign car repair shops everywhere.
A trip to India resulted in a picture of the goddess Kali gaining an extra hand. Irreverent, I guess, but not meant to be insulting. In Switzerland, Stumpy was able to substitute his hand for a keg on the neck of a St. Bernard, startling many mystified tourists at the Pass.
As the years passed, Stumpy did more outrageous things by paying people to assist him with his photos. One pic that illustrates this is of a fleshy nude woman posing with his artificial limb in a way that gives graphic clarity to the phrase, “I could use a helping hand!” [I wanted to illustrate my story with that one but the Thakkar Decency League wouldn't permit it.]
I lost contact with Stumpy when I moved and lived abroad for some years. When finally returning to the States, I tried to reconnect with him, but to no avail. Rumor had it that he had disappeared while visiting some primitive jungle regions. Not knowing what had happened to old Stumpy really irked me, but then one day we reconnected…sort of. Browsing through some old National Geographics at a weekend flea market I was fascinated by an article on some “lost” tribe that had supposedly never been in contact with the civilized world until very recently.
There on page 364 was a picture of the elders of the tribe worshipping an object mounted on an altar used for sacrifice. The object was a prosthetic arm and hand that retained only the middle finger, sticking straight into the air. Stumpy would have loved it.
