There's this guy I know, Wilhelm. Now, his real name isn't Wilhelm, of course, but I feel that everyone needs a name upgrade now and then. Whatever. Wilhelm. We were discussing Wilhelm.

Ya see, Wilhelm has no neck. I don't mean in that football player "big muscled shoulders and neck so that the neck almost vanishes" sort of way either. I mean that this man literally has no neck. It's a birth defect. His chin slopes right into his chest, and the back of his skull rests on his shoulders. No neck at all. He can't turn his head, can't look up and down -- nothing of the sort.

It'd be easy to mock him for it. I'm sure people have. He's about four feet tall and built fairly solid. He's a wide man, but it isn't fat -- it's muscle. That has the unfortunate effect of making his shoulders a bit larger, which means that literally come up close to his ears.

Yep, sure would be easy to make fun of Wilhelm, wouldn't it?

He works for a bar I hit on occasion. I noticed him one night, while sitting there slamming back beers and scratching notes toward a story. I thought, at first, that he was just carrying a heavy bucket of dishes so his shoulders were all scrunched up. Then he passed by again without anything in his hands at all, and I realized what the situation was.

Wilhelm isn't a waiter; he's a busboy. One of those invisible people you let pass you by all night clearing away the rubble of your dinner with swift grace. You might not notice him at all except for, at first, his height, and then, his lack of neck.

That first time I saw Wilhelm I had to force myself to not stare after him too long. I wanted to look at his head to see how his back was designed and to study his shoulders. He was a curiosity.

The more I saw him, though, the more I realized how much he does to be admired. Come on, if you were possessed of the problem that Wilhelm is, would you go out into the public every day? Hold down a job that requires you to be seen by strangers every few minutes? Would you ignore it and just live your life, doing everything you could to live the perfectly normal life you could do -- even if you had to be just a bit braver?

Who knows? That's between you and your therapist's couch.

Still. Wilhelm doesn't just bus tables. He also delivers food. Take-out delivery. In Manhattan that means this four foot man with no neck gets on a bike and pedals away. Think about it for a second -- here's a guy who can look around less than Michael Keaton in his Batman suit, and he's jumping on a bicycle and riding in Manhattan traffic.

I know six foot Aryan motherfuckers who won't ride in street traffic if they can help it, and here's this guy just not even considering the issue, treating it like there's nothing abnormal about a short man with no neck cycling at speed with cars doing 30 mph kamikaze runs at cabs and dodging busses that swerve at the merest hint of a pedestrian.

It makes me want another drink. It makes me consider the things I fear and do anyway, and more to the point, the ones I fear and refuse to do for small reasons. Wilhelm makes me feel small and immobile sometimes. The world is full of people like this, but we seem to only pay attention to ones who can't force themselves to even try. We make television shows about them and throw flowers at the feet of their failure.

Maybe we're looking at the wrong group.