My Morning

The sea grass undulates softly beckoning. The fan coral stretches unearthly orange fingers as I drift over, the turquoise water warm against my bare skin. A fat, indolent grouper feasts on the microscopic entities that find their way into her mouth as she hovers glub-glub-glubbing several inches above the bottom. I swim up to her face and we exchange fishy gossip for several minutes. I drill a school of sergeant majors who rally to my commands in close order drill, left-right, left-right. The sun's rays through the water guide my way to the surface. Like a mermaid seeking her nightly transformation, I rise, I rise...

7:30 a.m. The nightmare begins. Desmond taps the medicine cup against the table. Tap -tap-tap. It reverberates like machine-gun fire, "let me die, let me die, let me die, fuck,fuck." My arms and legs shoot straight out and shake uncontrollably. I squirm like a spider simultaneously electrocuted and crushed underneath a giant's boot. My ribs squeezed, I can only scream silently. "Ah-ah-ah". One of the nurse's aides (crater-face bitch Frannie) in the hospital liked to imitate me, thought it was funny. I told her supervisor she was stealing money out of my wallet, and had her fired. That was funny.

I try to slow my breathing down, quiet down the spasms. It doesn't work. My Desmond raises my bed then performs my morning catheterization. He inserts a red plastic tube into the end of my dick and drains the liter of piss that has accumulated in my bladder overnight. My shaking moderates, becoming less violent if not less painful. The expression on Desmond's dark face tells me that I shit the bed again. He rolls me, a 350 pound marshmallow, first left than right, washes me off, and then changes my pad.

He sits me up so he can feed me my pills. Neurontin, 500 mg for neuropathy. Baclofen, 30 mg for spasticity. Celexa, 90 mg for depression. Xanax for anxiety. Terazosin for bladder function. Naproxen for arthritic pain. Finally, a lovely pink Dilaudid because he loves me and wants me to die.

Desmond lays me back down then places first one trembling foot than the other against his shoulder and leans with all his might. My knees finally unlock. He rotates my hips first one way than the other. He extends my legs and bends my feet back, stretching my ankles. My joints pop and crackle gratefully. It feels like a blow job from Cleopatra.

He then pulls me up so that my upper body is vertical, then turns me so that my legs hang over the side of the bed,my head and shoulder leaning on his body.

After releasing me from my binder and my tight white leggings, Desmond hugs and twists me onto the next station of my cross, my shower chair, this great wheeled plastic contraption with a gaping hole in the middle for my ass to poke through. Underneath the hole situated on a wire frame sits a square yellow plastic tub. A tub for a tub. He straps me in.

Next, Desmond snaps on a rubber glove. He pokes a hole into the top of a Theravac suppository and then sticks it up my ass and squeezes. He then inserts his finger into my rectum and stirs. I am soon rewarded by the plop of my soft shits against the hard plastic followed by an explosion of gas and a gratifying gush of brown ass water. Success.

"Are we going to the hospital today?" Desmond lisps his first words of the day in his thick Jamaican patois. I like it quiet in the morning.

"Not today," I reply. Twice a week, an ambulette takes me to the hospital where I get muscled onto a special bicycle where a therapist attaches electrodes to my legs. An electrical current is then applied, stimulating my legs to jerk around hard enough to turn the pedals. It's like that experiment in biology class where you get a dead frog to jump by hooking its legs up to a battery. It's supposed to be good for me.

Today is not one of those days, and Desmond knows it. He just wanted to make conversation, just not much of it.

Desmond dumps out my shit bucket, washes it out then rolls me into the shower. He soaps up a washcloth and scrubs me from head to obese toe with extremely hot water. He lifts each fold of fat from my hairy belly and rubs and scrubs, causing the eczema which colonizes in the warm, moist spaces between each flabby layer to crack and ooze a thin red fluid. I feel none of this.

He then rubs me dry with a towel. The painful shuddering subsides into a gentle hum.

Next, Desmond rolls me back to the bedroom, lifts me up and with a well practiced twisting motion plops me back into bed, although I easily outweigh him by 200 pounds.

He trims my nails and cuts my nose hairs. He shaves my face with an electric razor although I rarely leave the house. He sprays and powders those areas which need to be sprayed and powdered. He dresses me in a diaper, white socks, sneakers, sweatpants and a New York Mets sweatshirt, size XXL which is too tight for me. I'm at least two X 's short.

Desmond then rolls out my specially-designed double-wide $20,000 Swedish-built computerized power wheelchair, plunks me down and straps me in. I control the beast by banging my head onto various pressure-sensitive spots on the headrest. Straight back, forward. Tap twice, backward. Tap right, turn right. Left, turn left.

Time for breakfast, which Desmond prepares, then feeds me. Four eggs, scrambled with onions and goat cheese. Home fries, burnt. Two buttered croissants. A large, high-octane Bloody Mary, extra spicy. Strong coffee, with cream and sweet n' low. For dessert, two Vicodin and a cheese Danish.

I roll over to my desk, have Desmond turn my computer on and place a wireless headset mike around my neck and a metal contraption in my mouth that enables me to madly peck away at my keyboard like a chicken scratching at her feed. Peck, peck,peck. I call up the voice recognition software. Peck, peck. "Open Internet Explorer." Peck, peck, peck, peck. "Go to home page." Check on foreign markets. Hang Seng. Up 422 . Peck, peck. Nikkei. Up 311. Peck, peck. FTSE index. Down 97. Peck, peck, peck. US stocks. Dow down 32 to open. Peck, peck, peck, peck. Research, bring up MorningStar, then peck, peck S&P, peck, peck, Bloomberg. Peck, peck, peck . Beta coefficients, price-to-earnings ratios, return-on-investment. I bob my head up and down, at the computer then the calculator.

It seems while I was dreaming of fishies and getting finger-fucked by Desmond, my investments made me $10,000 richer. Nonetheless, I spend about an hour buying and selling, more out of boredom than avarice, dictating and pecking madly away at my computer until my neck hurt,. It's easy to make money when you have money.

To reward myself for my fiscal perspicacity I tap twice to back up, once left to turn left, then once to roll forward to the liquor cabinet. I have Desmond pour me a large Johnnie Blue, straight up, into my sippy cup. He rolls his eyes disparagingly as he places the cup on the dining room table, then turns and swishes away. It's only 10 o'clock.

"You might want to have one too," I yell after him. "It might improve your disposition." Desmond bangs around the kitchen, saying nothing. If he feels like fighting, I'll know soon enough.

The Rape of the Sock

Somebody had been here. I knew it the second I opened the door. Nothing was where I had left it. Some malicious malefactor had penetrated my sanctum sanctorum. The godless Saracens had desecrated the Holiest Of Holies. Somebody had definitely been here.

The cheerful bouquet, that enchanting amalgam of gym locker and opium den, that had greeted my nostrils every day upon my return from the cold, cruel, world had been supplanted by the sickly sweet chemical aroma that could only have originated from a spray can.

That comforting layer of dust, which softened the hard edges and harsh colors of contemporary existence, and which when aroused, awoke into a myriad of multicolored motes that capered balletically in the sunshine as it beat through my window every morning, was no more.

That delightful disarray which chronicled my days page by page, layer by layer, had been disturbed, no destroyed, by a horde of merciless Mongols.

Can you say for certain what you had for dinner three weeks ago last Wednesday? I had only to direct my gaze to a certain point beneath my bed and I knew! A savory half mushroom, half pepperoni from Domino's. Medium. And for dessert, a second pie for only five dollars. And a 32-ounce Coke Classic.

There was a place for everything and everything in its place. My gym shorts? Right on the floor, where they belonged. My souvenir Metallica sleeveless sweatshirt ? Half in my top drawer and half out. The hand-painted Tycho Brahe necktie I was awarded for distinguished service by the Math Team? Rolled up nicely into a little ball and placed neatly inside my seldom-used infielder's glove, thank you very much.

My room was the quintessence of both beauty and efficiency. I could have lived out my days, deaf dumb and blind and wanted for nothing.

Hungry? There was always a Butterfinger or Clark Bar of indeterminate age at my fingertips. If I got thirsty, there was always a half-empty can of something within easy reach.

All my clothing was carefully positioned at ground level where I could simultaneously mix and match. I could select a complete ensemble without leaving the comfort of my bed and never wear the same one twice.

How was I to find anything now?

My pants, once amiably arrayed within plain sight and close reach, now hung closeted, in dank and dark perdition.

My shirts, once glorious in their natural state, now sat suffocating in dresser drawers, pressed into service in a manner contrary to any sane laws of God or man.

My shoes and sneakers were now aligned in soulless symmetry on my closet floor, as if in some demented close order drill.

And my socks, my poor pets. All folded flat like spaniel's ears and stacked together like slaves on the Amistad. And the smell! Had God wanted our feet to smell like detergent, He would have filled our veins with phosphates.

All my beautiful chaos, the glorious entropy that had taken me a lifetime to achieve, had been demolished in a single spasm of demented destructiveness by the ghastly Goths. Some foul Philistine had pissed on my Pollock, crapped on my Kandinsky.

My room, my beautiful Chamber of Secrets, had fallen victim to some cruel, constipated psyche who could not comprehend, could not see the beauty!

Nailed on the cross of convention by some joyless Judas, I could only cry out, anguished, in Torment and Fury!

"Mom!"