When Service Monkeys Attack

T.K. Small of Brooklyn, New York thinks he’s the king of the smart ass cripples. He says he’s even got to the cup to prove it. His girlfriend gave it to him. It’s a brown ceramic coffee mug that says number one smart ass.

But I disagree. In my smart ass point system, a blog trumps a mug easy. So we decided we’re going to settle once and for all who reigns as smart ass cripple supreme by arm wrestling for it. That’s a pretty funny joke since neither one of us can raise our arms.

T.K. was born in 1965 in New York. He was educated for a few years in your standard segregated gimp school of the time and lived for nine years in a rehab facility for children and adolescents. These day he rolls around in a motorized wheelchair and has a 24/7 crew of attendants. He works as a lawyer for the New York state Independent Living Council and takes some ADA cases on the side.

So T.K. has been among cripples galore his whole life but one of the most memorable ones was his friend… ( Let us pause for a minute to state that it is our editorial policy here at Smart Ass Cripple to use an alias whenever there is a danger of outing someone who may not want to be outed for whatever reason. So let’s refer to T.K.’s friend as Clarence Thomas.)… his friend Clarence Thomas.

Clarence Thomas was a big, broad rugged looking guy with a long ponytail. He was a high level quadriplegic. T.K. says, “He got blown off a building by a big gust of wind. He told me he was high when it happened. He woke up three days later in the hospital.”
But even in state of heavy duty quadhood, Clarence Thomas remained a party fool. “He went to a nudist colony in Brazil once. All he was wearing was a smile and his leg bag.” He must’ve gone to 100 Grateful Dead concerts. He followed the dead to Jamaica once. That’s how T.K. met him, at a Dead concert at Madison Square Garden.

Here’s another thing about him: “He would ask anyone to help him with anything under any circumstances. He would ask a complete stranger to empty his leg bag.”

And one more thing: “(Clarence Thomas) was a terrible wheelchair driver. He’d put a hole in your wall and say, ’Who put that wall there?’” And Clarence Thomas often drove his motorized wheelchair on city streets. So of course one day he got hit by a car and sued. “He ended up with a lump sum. He had this crack head that was living with him. They decided that a good thing to do was to buy a gigantic rock of cocaine. It was about the size of a golf ball.”

Meanwhile: “Along the way somewhere, somebody gave (Clarence Thomas) the idea that he should have a service monkey. The way he would control the monkey was that the monkey wore a discipline collar and (Clarence Thomas) would give it a shock.”

You can see where this is leading, can’t you? “Well one night there was a party and the monkey discovered the cocaine. He ran around the apartment going crazy. And his little monkey dick got hard. And he tried to hump (Clarence Thomas) in this ear.
So he’s shocking the monkey to try to get it to stop. The same way a dog humps your leg, the monkey was trying to hump people in their ears.”

Perhaps that was rock bottom. “Later on his brother staged an intervention.
(Clarence Thomas) went into rehab and the monkey went back to wherever he came from.”

Clarence Thomas cleaned up pretty good after that. “Four or five years ago, we all went out to dinner for a friend’s birthday. He was in a great mood. And then we got a phone call the next morning that he was dead. His attendant couldn’t wake him up in the morning.”

“He died like Jerry Garcia. I don’t think he wanted to die but I don’t think he had any regrets.”

See how a service monkey can change your life?