Posted by nigel1 on June 21, 2002 at 14:29:19:
Are you getting all of this? I don't want to waste any of this stuff, so please tell me, are you getting all of this? Here we go then. Here we go. Ahem! My wheelchair was my life. For almost as long as I can recall, I lived in a wheelchair. It was always the same wheelchair. It got old and rusty, and parts of it wore out, victimized by various forms of decay, but local agencies made it good again. In fact, they were local self-help agencies, and so it would be better to say they helped me to make it good again. And to them I went when I was down on my luck, insisting nobody push me. No no no, I said. All in my own good time. Then I would lose my temper. Eat me, I cried, eat me in an iron lung. I've grew attached to my wheelchair. Once, I had to be removed from it, and it required strong solvents to break the bond. You could not tell where I began and the wheelchair ended. It was a matter of hammer and tongs. It is an extension of my body, they all said, all those differently abled ones, or whatever the stupid euphemism happened to be. And they spoke the truth. Once, I sat in my wheelchair for years and years, all alone, hour after hour, in the dark and gloom of I know not where, listening to the snow fall, the wind and the rain, the sun on the roof and the sun on the exposed beams when the roof fell in, the buds in their little vases, and vines and shoots, the fall of leaves and the wind and the rain, and the snow again, all alone. The next thing I knew, years had passed and young men in white coats sprinkled me with boric acid. The lights, when they came on again, were nearly blinding. They cursed and sweated as they worked. The stench was terrible. I wondered, were there any young ladies about? But I could not ask, for my mouth had filmed over with a sort of viscid crust, and my eyes refused to see. Everything bloomed and buzzed. My wheelchair took me away with it, carried me away, and left me in a dark corner to moulder while the axles rusted to the hubs, and the wheelspokes fell away. It even seemed that parts of my extemities had been nibbled at. One foot was entirely gone, and parts of one hand, though not vital parts. No more violins for me! No more engagements at the Met. Then again, fuck the Met. Little has it mattered. My arms in those days were matchsticks and twice as fragile. Ten times as fragile! Without those arms, I could still have survived, and even prospered after a fashion. A strong man could lift me, and with a proper harness heft me like a valise, and so carry me, from place to place. And it's still not too late. It could be done. All I need is a strong man, fee negotiable. HAW! I think of this. I watch the hours grow dim. How still! Like a sudden calm, with me as the storm! I radiate arms of light! I am like unto the spokes of my own wheels! I chasten all that I touch! Forgive me. I won't rave anymore. My tires were lumpy with abuse. I punished them on the library steps. I ground my teeth and assaulted the lowest step, fierce as a stone lion. If I slipped at any point along the way, I would snarl and grab a rail, or somebody's elbow or rearend. I would not be defeated. Inch by inch, step by step, slowly I turned, like an old vaudeville routine, I hauled and pummelled the winding stair. Once I flipped over backward and tumbled like a ball of dung forty feet and out the door and directly into the path of a bus. Fortunately it swerved at the last moment, missing me but crushing a young mother and her little baby girl. They were mashed into the backside of a Lexus. But I, by the grace of God, fetched up against a store front, upright, and began again, refusing all assistance. They were all so goddamned kind! I hated compassion. I likened compassion to a filmy plastic bag. I cried out in a loud voice, Back! Away! Leave me alone! Maybe there was a mean streak in me. If so, I have no idea how it got there. Or consider Mt. Ranier in the spring, as I have, rolling solitarily and doggedly along, grinding my teeth into pulp (the pain was exquisite!) with a firm two handled grip. Up we go. Up we go. Only another revolution, and then we rest. I made a chalk mark on a wheel and I counted the turns, for posterity. One, I counted, and then two. Then it was gone, the mark gone, rubbed out by my sweaty palms. In fury I nicked the rubber with my scout knife. There, I muttered. Take that. The weather was mild, and that was nice, at least. I'd taken sandwhiches. There was an apple in my lunchpail, a banana, a flask of brandy, and a small flag: Princeton, it said. What a glorious day! Unfortunately the wake of a speeding tractor-trailor rig spun me around and swept me into a drainage ditch. It is very important, bound to the chair as I was, to keep my wits about me. One false move and one is like a stone skipping across wide water, only to vanish with a sudden PLOONK and be seen no more. I did not have the latest friction brakes. But I had my two hands. With them I could do anything. I used to brandish them and say: my hands-- STRONG! Heh heh. I had no problem with menacing anything within reach. I was young, you see, and not willing to admit my unfortunate dependence upon human kindness, that nasty milk. I need your sympathy. I need your forebearance, and your patience, and your tolerance, but more than that, I need your goddamned help. Yes! Help! Help me! Set aside your chopping axe, stop polishing so lovingly that Colt Python, and send money. A difficult pill to swallow. Would you guess, that I longed, once, to be a great, manly, hulking Eagle Scout? I got most of the best paraphenalia, like a good sharp scout axe, and an excellent stabbing cutting slicing knife. I would surely have disemboweled someone, but the ambulatory cases all around me, the walking wounded, or even the walking dead, as I liked to think of them-- were difficult to catch. When I was very very young, I walked about like the best of them. In a dream I rose in the dark of night and made my way to the bathroom for a drink of cool water. My legs didn't work right. And then a very clear and distinct voice, much like a sportscaster's voice told me I would die in a chair! So disturbing. I was marked for the electric chair, and I knew in my heart, given my precocious attractions to guns, knives, tits and female bellies, that my crime would be a sex-crime of unusual brutality. But then I really came to like the idea! My fate was decided. So why not sit back and enjoy the ride? Who would it be, I wondered, and how would it be? I'd leave some girl, someday, naked and raped and dead, with my scoutknife sticking in her guts. Would I get to do more than one, before they caught me? Within a few months, I collapsed in the back yard. I'd been shooting BB pellets into a Barbie doll. I was one of the earliest victims of what would come to be known as Poliomyelitis Type IIIA. Yes, I know, the resultant plague killed many and ripped the social fabric (as we knew it in those days-- it was a fucking tattered rag and not much more) into absolute shreds. And I am lucky to be alive. One of the lucky ones. I think I can safely say that my wheelchair became my life. I'd even say, my wheelchair has been my wife! I got acquainted with my new mate, guaranteed for life. I spent days polishing the brightwork. I reached every crannie with my polishing cloth. Of course I never fucked my wheelchair. But how many husbands of fleshly wives could boast of entering their loved one's every orifice, their most hidden and intimate spaces, with a can of light machine oil and a polishing cloth? How many men could brag of greasing the old sow down, even to the juncture of femur and ilium-- probably as close as you can get in the flesh to the clean juncture of a hub and axle. A nurse at the institute said to me once that I had a clean machine. She laughed. Haw. Haw. She did not laugh with me, but at me, I felt. She was beautiful and pregnant, untouched as yet by the deadly virus, a "lucky" one! I would have loved to kill her. I longed to run my wheels, back and forth, and up and down, her lovely body, tipping perilously over the hillock in her middle, and between the clefts of her many cleavages, until she cried out for mercy. Then I'd stab her. I'd stick my trusty scoutknife in her rounded tummy. So many were folding like oysters in those days, many desperate therapies were tried. I came to the institute to have a box wired to the base of my spine, and to have small probes inserted into the muscles of my legs. You will be a hero, they said. There is a chance you will walk again. What a sucker I was. On day one I thrashed so much a tibia cracked. On day two I twisted into a pretzel and fibrillated. On day three I stayed in bed. I entertained myself with visions of the young nurse tightly bound, naked, with her bra stuffed between her teeth and her bikini panties shoved part way up her butthole. A time came, as the plague ebbed and flowed, that a woman loved me. I don't know why. She was a homely thing. She wasn't exactly what I would have left in a pool of blood. I held her on my lap, because my hands were strong, strong! Let me go! Let me go, she cried, struggling against the steel bands that were my arms, the iron clamps that were my hands. I think, at first, she really did want to be free of me. Eventually, after proving to myself I know not what, I did let her go. Her arms were bruised where I held her, and her face was red and teary. Our breath came hot and fast. I was frightened. It was the closest I'd ever been to a woman. I hardly knew myself. Forgive me, I said. I've never done anything like that before, honest. It was a spell that came over me, soon as I saw you. (What a dog, what a lieing dog.) I wondered whether she'd buy that. I swore to her. She did not run away. She looked me over, looking hurt, from a safe distance. She breathed heavily and hoarsely. Her breasts heaved! I'll never forget that! She massaged her wrists, first one and then the other. You hurt me, she said. I'm sorry, I said. You're strong! she said. I said nothing. I felt unclean. Later she let me undress her, and I lay on my back, in my narrow bed, while she swarmed over me. Turned out she liked to be hurt. Turned out, I had compunctions I never would have guessed having. I was unnerved. It was my first time and nothing worked as advertised. I had to use my fingers. I pinched her all over until she came, messily, a big splash right over my pubes. I thought at first she pissed on me. But no. More apologies seemed in order. I'm sorry, I said. That's OK, she said. She might have gotten what she wanted. She had bruises all over. She wanted to know if she was my first. No, I lied. I couldn't tell her the truth! After she left I had a sudden, furious, throbbing erection that would not go away no matter what I did, and I tried for hours and hours to get rid of it because the damn thing was painful. I wrapped it in a rag soaked in rubbing alcohol. I should have set a match to it. And as we all discovered later, the onset of phase two of the new polio virus is marked, in men, by a bout of priapism, followed by total impotence. That night, I merely followed what eventually became a classic pattern. In women, it was a little different. They developed a numbness from the chest down. Sigh. Undoubtedly, she's dead now-- my lay of that fatal night, along with the lovely nurse, and her child, and many many others. LOOK! I don't know how many of us you've bothered to preserve. If you've got such fantastic technology, if you can cross space, conquer time, or whatever else you weird looking sons of bitches can do, WHY COULDN'T YOU FIX US UP? Why'd you let so many of us die? Don't look at me like that! You give me the creeps! Yeah, take away that recording shit. I've told you my story. And I know what makes you tick, you ET maggots. I can tell you're two sexes-- you fucking lizards are just like us. And your night attendant or whatever the hell he is, last night I watched him. He was playing a video of some sort, a 3-D holo thing right next to my bed-- goofing off, I guess. It was very interesting, a creature that looked just like him, stabbing one of your females, over and over with a wicked barbed blade-- and then a shooting, and then a decaptitation, green blood and alien guts all over the place. He couldn't take his eyes off of it, I tell you! He reached under that smock thing you all wear, and by God, don't try to tell me otherwise! He was MASTURBATING!