At age 19, John “J2” Mryczko crashed a friend’s motorcycle going 120 mph around a curve. He ended up paralyzed from the chest down, with some movement in his arms and none in his fingers, though he could use his hands as claws. After three months at the Rehabilitation Institute downtown, he moved into the front room of his mom’s house in Morton Grove, where he’s lived for the last nine years. He requires round-the-clock attention from family members and a part-time caregiver.
“I feel good after a crash because it makes me feel alive,” he says. “I get tingles. I get happy. It fills a spot in my body. A few seconds feel like a few minutes of freedom.”
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A clip of the October wipeout is on his Web site, j2rollson.com. (J2 is a nickname from grade school, when he joined a class that already had a John.) “See my arm behind me?” he says as it plays on his computer. “I didn’t notice that the first few times I watched that. That could be where I broke my bone.” He didn’t realize it yet but he’d broken another bone the night before at the House of Blues. He’s not sure how that happened: “Maybe some girls jumping on my lap.”
The plan worried Mryczko’s mother, Halina, a Polish immigrant who cleans houses for a living, and his three younger sisters. “He was going to do what he was going to do, but we decided at least we could be there, too,” says his eldest sister, Anna, a 26-year-old nurse.
In 2005 Mryczko decided to attempt a 40-mile ride on dirt trails in the Beck Lake Forest Preserve in Glenview. By now he was driving—a specially equipped Dodge Caravan the state helped his family pay for in 2004—and he surveyed the area beforehand “to make sure there were no curbs I had to get up or down.” But a two-month wait for replacement parts for his wheelchair killed his plan. By the time he got the parts it was too cold to ride.
Last summer’s trail ride was more challenging than usual because the Des Plaines River had flooded a week before and the trail was covered with branches and other debris left behind when it receded. On the first day Mryczko brought along a cousin, who shot video. The second day he went alone, and on the third day his part-time caregiver biked along.
This summer Mryczko is promoting a weeklong Rollathon, starting July 4. He intends to ride 180 miles, from Morton Grove to Davenport, Iowa. He’s publicizing the ride through word of mouth, his Web sites, and postcards and flyers he’s placing in businesses in and around Morton Grove. But, he confesses, “I don’t know if anyone’s going to join me on that one.”
