Joe Gougeon lives in an apartment in Bradford. His upstairs neighbor, Phil Garland, a registered sex offender, cares for him during the day. The following is an edited interview.

The guy's name was Bill Kramer. I helped him put in his swimming pool - this was in the ’80s - and once in a while we'd go up there swimming.

One day his daughter says, “Joe, show me how to do a jackknife dive.” I says, “No, because you dive in this pool, you’re going to get hurt.” And it was, “Come on, please, Joe?”

A little 12-year-old girl, what do you say?

I went through the motions without actually doing it. I went into the pike position, turned my head up to look at her, and said, “Like this, but don’t do this dive in this pool because you’ll hurt yourself.” Well, just as the words come out of my mouth, my feet slip and I go down. I hit the side of my head and my shoulder. My neck, I broke that up with four vertebrae.

They said I wouldn’t live. Then they said I wouldn’t walk again. I told the doctor the next time he saw me I’d be walking into his office with a magnum of champagne. I kept my word.

Now I’ve got what they call a good case of myopathy, which is my hands, my legs, everything is asleep. You know that buzzing and tingling, like if you sit on a stool too long reading a magazine or something and you go to stand up? Like that, 24 hours a day. I was in pain from this bull so they put me on Percoset, then OxyContin.

I don’t have much strength or anything in my arms, so Phil cuts my food up for me, gets my medication ready - he does all kinds of stuff. He helps me in bed and covers me up. In the summer, we go together fishing. He casts my fishing pole and I reel it back in.

We’re more like brothers than we are friends. If he didn’t live upstairs, I don’t know what I’d do. Because of him, I stopped my drinking. I used to be a boozer and raise a lot of hell. Jack Daniels, I drank it like water. Since I met Phil, I don’t even have Budweiser around.

I’m waiting for people to say, “You shouldn’t be trusting him.” But we all got our lives to live. Pick your own friends, that’s the way I was taught. He made a mistake, big deal. I made plenty of mistakes, bad if not worse than what he done. If you screw up, you screw up. Move on. That’s what I did with the motorcycle gang, but that’s a whole other story.