Defenseless Cripples

So it appears the final solution has been determined. In every U.S. state it’s now legal to carry a concealed gun.

I guess the idea is to build to a climactic shootout scene, like the fucking OK Corral, between the good guys, whomever they are, and the bad guys, whomever they are. And when the official final body count is calculated, certified and notarized, the good guys win!

Is that some kind of psycho Barney Fife shit or what?

But a fat lot of good being able to pack heat does for cripples like me who can't use our arms much. The concealed part is no problem. I can shove a gun deep down into the backpack that always hangs on the back of my wheelchair. But what happens when I have to use it, like to defend myself against a mugger? I’ll have to ask some Good Samaritan passerby to please get the gun out of my backpack. But even then I won’t be able to pull the trigger. I can’t even hold the damn gun up! So I’ll have to ask the kind Samaritan to please also shoot the mugger. I know people feel mighty charitable when they see a cripple in distress, but that’s really testing the limits.

But I have to do something to defend myself because I never want to be a defenseless cripple. And pretty soon the bad guys will figure out that the only ones who can’t shoot back are cripples like me who can’t hold up a gun. So they’ll attack us more and more.

About the only lethal weapon I could readily use would be poison blow darts.  But it has to be hands free poison blow darts, so I’ll have to rig up something like those beer drinkers’ batting helmets where there’s a beer can mounted on each side and straws running from the cans to your mouth. Except the straws will run from my mouth to dart launching cylinders atop the helmet so I can shoot poison darts with a mere puff. This will add an extra accessorizing step to my morning routine. After combing my hair, my pit crew assistant will have to dip my blow darts in deadly poison, load them into the cylinders and strap the helmet to my head.

I’ll mass produce these helmets so my fellow cripples can defend themselves in this wide open new world. Once we take down a mugger or two with poison darts, word will spread and the rest of the muggers will know not to mess with any cripple wearing a batting helmet with straws. Then, about the only cripples incapable of self-defense through lethal force will be the comatose. And so the muggers, desperate to find a new pool of defenseless victims, will break into hospitals and nursing homes looking for comatose people to mug. But the batting helmet could probably be equipped with some sort of sensors so comatose people could launch darts by using brain waves. Rigging up something like that can’t be too hard to do. I’ve heard stories about cripples operating stuff like computers and motorized wheelchairs using sensor caps and brain waves. So then the comatose person wearing one of my helmets with sensors cold just think something like “Shoot that sonuvabitch” and the darts fly! Let’s just hope the sonuvabitch they want to shoot isn’t some poor nurse’s aide who gives crappy sponge baths.

That will leave the totally brain dead as the only truly defenseless cripples. I’m afraid there’s not much I can do to help them defend themselves. We may have to throw them to the muggers.

Demand Hot Pink

The frame of Rahnee’s new wheelchair is hot pink. That’s a big deal. It wasn’t long ago that such a frivolity was severely frowned upon. Riding around in a hot pink wheelchair was considered as disrespectful as showing up to a funeral dressed like a drag queen wearing fishnets and a feather boa.

Wheelchairs came only in colors synonymous with infirmity or mourning. But then cripples started demanding jazzier color options. And so today’s criplets, when they order a wheelchair, get to choose from an ever expanding spectrum of colors with fancy names. Like for instance yellow, green and blue are called like finch, moss and cobalt.

You’re welcome, criplets.

Yes, we’ve come a long way, but there’s still much work to be done. Susan told me when she ordered a new chair, she wanted a leopard skin colored frame. But the wheelchair people told her there was no such thing, unless they made her something custom, which of course they would be more than happy to do for three or four extra buckets full of cash.

But that’s bullshit. Leopard skin should be standard, dammit. This is the 21^st Century! So when the present generation of criplets emerges as a potent political force, it will be up to them to press that demand, so the criplets that follow them can have leopard skin in the standard color spectrum, as America’s founding fathers intended.

And of course there’s an even greater political frontier in dire need of conquest: upholstery. Wheelchair frames may come in all kinds of crazy colors, but the upholstery is always the blackest black. On the color spectrum, it would be called something like widow. But I dream of the day when wheelchair upholstery will come in all kinds of crazy patterns, like leopard skin, rainbow, acid trip and Picasso’s Blue Nude.

But our work still won’t be done until not only are all these choices standard but it’s all covered by Medicare and Medicaid. Right now, about the only wheelchairs Medicare and Medicaid will pay for are the ones made out of wicker and wood.

 Bringing about this policy shift will be the political frontier for the first wave of cripples who role around like cocky roosters in chairs with hot pink frames and gold sequined upholstery. They’ll be the cripple equivalent of drag queens. And they will serve the same vital political purpose as the drag queens by shaking things up, not just in polite society but among the assimilationist cripples as well. When the brash young cripples in their blaring wheelchairs show up for cripple lobby days at state capitols, the assimiliationist cripples will crap in their pants and spew their cappuccino. They know the Higher Power is easily spooked. The delicate negotiations could well be ruined by such militant upholstery.

But there’s no turning back now. Hot pink is only the start.

Free Money

As you know, I spent five of my adolescent years as an inmate in a state-operated boarding school for cripples, aka the Sam Houston Institute of Technology (SHIT).  Well I heard a rumor that one of my fellow inmates is now a multimillionaire. I checked into it to find out how the hell he managed to do that, because everyone wants to know the secrets of how the rich get rich. From what I heard, he pretty much became rich overnight. And anyone who’s really determined to get rich can do exactly what he did.

Here’s the story I heard:

My fellow inmate was born with cerebral palsy. A couple decades after leaving the cripple school, he took a vacation. He landed at the airport and a vehicle with a wheelchair lift was dispatched to take him to his destination. En route, the vehicle crashed. And because the driver did not tie down my friend’s wheelchair, he went flying, chair and all. My friend broke his neck and now he’s a cripple squared-- a quadriplegic with cerebral palsy.

But here’s the lucky part. His destination was a Vegas casino and the vehicle was the van the casino used for toting crippled guests. So I ask you, if you’re going to sue somebody for making you crippled, could you present a jury with a more unsympathetic villain than a Vegas casino? My friend collected $8 million, so I’m told.

Okay so who’s ready to get out there and strike it rich the same way my friend did? How about it? Let’s see a show of hands! Who’s with me? Anybody? Hello?

Come on! It’s easy! You’ll never have to work again! It’s free money!

There are some cripples who never worked a day in their lives and they get free money every month from the government. Anyone can get in on this scam, too. All you have to do is become crippled. You’ll receive about $550 a month from Social Security, so you’ll have just about enough cash to live a nice, spacious, wheelchair-accessible port-a-potty. Oh and in order to keep your checks coming, you also have to take a solemn vow that for the rest of your life you will remain as broke as a crack whore.

Any takers? And no, you can’t have the monthly check without the crippledness and the poverty. It’s the whole package or nothing.

Nobody? Going once, going twice...  Maybe it’s not such a sweet gig after all, eh? I know the feeling.  I’ll tell you which cripples used to make me jealous.  I’m jealous of the ones who get big fat book deals! Talk about free money! That’s got to be the sweetest gig of all! I used to think I’d do anything to land a big fat book deal. But then I heard about this guy who wrote a bestseller about how a bear ripped his face off. And it wasn’t fiction.

No thanks. I’d rather be a broke and obscure writer who never had his face ripped off by a bear.

That’s how it is with all those cripples and their free money. It surely ain’t free.

The Crippled Jackson Pollock

A lot of people view cripple art in the same dismissive way they view cripple sports.  The prevailing image of cripple sports is a giant clown face painted on a slab of wood that’s mounted upright and there are holes cut out where the clown’s eyes, nose and mouth ought to be. And cripples try to toss beanbags through the holes. And the winner gets a medal and a hug. And so do the losers. And the prevailing image of cripple art is a stick figure sculpture made out of pipe cleaners. Or maybe made out of Popsicle sticks glued together with Elmer’s.

But there’s a crippled abstract expressionist painter from Spain who may well destroy all the negative stereotypes about crippled artists. His name is Alejandro Mierda de Toro and he’s paralyzed from the neck down. He broke his neck in a tragic accident from which he learned a valuable lesson:  NEVER text while running with the bulls.

 Mierda de Toro can only move his head. He was an art student at the time of his accident but he remained determined to achieve his dream of becoming a famous painter. His therapists encouraged him by introducing him to the work of the many crippled artists from around the world who paint by holding a paintbrush in their mouth. But their style left him cold. He saw it as hotel art-- paint-by-numbers-looking pictures of old barns and soaring eagles.

Mierda de Toro wanted to paint in the drip, splatter and splash style of his idol, American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock.  One day Mierda de Toro had a revelation and on that day he found his voice as a crippled artist. He decided he would indeed use his mouth to paint, but he would not use a brush.  Thus, in a typical painting session, one of Mierda de Toro uncrippled assistants stood eagerly by. The artist studied his canvas intensely and called out for a color, as a surgeon calls out for an instrument. The assistant then dropped a straw into a canister containing that color of paint and held it up to the artist’s mouth. The artist drew in a precise mouthful of the paint through the straw and then spat the paint onto the canvas.

The results are nothing short of amazing. Mierda de Toro has created countless new colors by sloshing multiple colors of paint around in his mouth before spitting.

Art historians refer to this early stage of Mierda de Toro’s career as his spit period. During this time, the entire inside of his mouth looked like a Jackson Pollock painting, even though he gargled regularly with turpentine.

Mierda de Toro then evolved into what is known as his turkey baster period. His assistants held up turkey basters filled with paint and Mierda de Toro applied the paint to the canvas by biting down hard on the baster bulb. (Author’s note: Mierda de Toro does not have much of a sense of humor so DO NOT refer to him as a master baster. Trust me. I know.)

Mierda de Toro’s work has sometimes been controversial, such as his infamous Chihuahua Project. His plan was to  put Chihuahuas of all shapes and sizes into a room covered with canvas from floor to ceiling and then dump paint on the dogs so they could create an abstract painting by shaking and rolling around like dogs do when then they get all wet. But after protests by animal rights activists, his public commission for the project was rescinded.

Mierda de Toro’s next frontier is large-scale public art. He received a commission to paint a mural on the wall of a government office building in Madrid. He will execute the project by first having his assistants set up dozens of large vats of paint on the roof’s edge at the top of the wall. Then Mierda de Toro will be lowered by a rope in his wheelchair from a helicopter and swung like a wrecking ball until he personally knocks over each vat and all the paint spills down the wall.

Thanks to the fiery young Alejandro Mierda de Toro, soon the public perception of crippled artists will never be the same. Everybody will picture a cripple in a wheelchair biting a baster bulb or dangling from a helicopter.

Sitting on My Ass Watching Sports

All this smart ass stuff is just a means to an end.  My true calling is to be a celebrated philanthropist.

My first humanitarian project will be to open Smart Ass Cripple’s Home for Wayward Girls (ages 18 and up). And after I’ve done that, I’ll start a charity with the mission of creating opportunities for young criplets to fully enjoy sports. I owe a lot to sports. Sports meant a great deal to me as a criplet. Sports did a lot to mold my character and shape me into the man I am today.

I didn’t actually play sports. I’m crippled, remember? There was a time when I could hit a whiffle ball a good 10 yards, but those days a long gone. I’m talking about sitting on my ass watching sports.  I want future generations of cripples to have the same, if not better, opportunity that I had to sit on their asses and watch sports.

I hated any sport where the spectators had to be quiet, like tennis. If I couldn’t yell and scream and act like an ass hole, then what was the point? The only people who can yell and scream and act like an ass hole at tennis matches are the tennis players. I hate golf for the same reason. You can’t heckle. I guess it’s because hitting a golf ball or tennis ball requires intense concentration. But big deal! Hitting a curveball is hard too. What if Albert Pujols refused to step into the batter’s box until there was complete silence?  Ha!

The joy of being a fan was in the heckling. Thus, sitting on my ass watching sports was the most constructive form of releasing tension and hostility available to me as a boy, especially since I was Catholic so I couldn’t jerk off. I wouldn’t be condemned to hell for watching sports. I was, however, a Cubs fan, which is pretty much the same as being condemned to hell.

But I got away with stuff as a fan that I never would get away with in real life. I expressed my bitterness at the success of those I didn’t like and gloated when they were defeated. I heckled those who didn’t please me.  Everybody needs a chance to vent their petty vindictiveness now and then and get it out of their system, especially adolescents.  Let’s not pretend we don’t.

Today, sitting on my ass watching sports is satisfying on an additional level because I also get to heckle millionaires. So I don’t want criplets to miss out. My foundation will organize field trips where we take criplets to games and teach them the fine art of heckling. The shy and sheltered ones will receive a list of standard insults like “You suck!” to which they can refer until they develop the social skills to craft their own insults.  

My greatest dream is take them to something like Wimbledon and watch the match come to a halt while security ejects a bunch of criplets. That would be such a deeply rewarding experience, for the little criplets and for me.

Branded

I live in constant fear that someday I will lose my pit crew. Those are the people I hire to drag my ass out of bed every day, make my meals, do my laundry, scrub my toilet, wipe my butt, etc. The state pays their wages. And we all know what the legislature giveth the legislature can just as easily taketh away, especially these days when they’re privatizing the everlovin' hell out of everything.

If that ever happens, in order to meet payroll by my own devices, I will probably have no choice but to do something that is against all my moral and political principles. I’ll have to either 1) turn tricks or 2) wear a t-shirt with a corporate product brand on the front.

To me, wearing a Budweiser shirt or McDonald’s boxer shorts makes the following fashion statement: “I’m a chump.” I’m paying a humongous corporation to advertise their product. Pretty good scam they’ve got going on there. If I was the Super Bowl, I could charge them 1.5 skillion bucks to flash their silly little brand for 30 seconds.

But if cripples are left to throw ourselves at the mercy of the Fortune 500 to fund our butt wiping escapades, these shrewd capitalists will seize the opportunity to traffic in the seedy business of human billboards. Cripples like me will be assigned a corporate sugar daddy to pay for our pit crew and in exchange we will have to wear a shirt emblazoned with one of their brands everywhere we go. And we’ll have to hang around whatever strategic locations the corporations send us to reach the target demographic. Like for instance, if you’re wearing a Viagra shirt, you’ll have to hang around golf tournaments.

It might not be so bad, especially if I end up with a brand that makes me look cool, like Jack Daniels or Harley Davidson. It might even turn out to be my dream job. My dream job has always been whatever the easiest job in the world is at the time. Right now it seems like the easiest job in the world is sign holder. But human billboard would surpass that as the easiest job in the world. You don’t even have to exert the effort it takes to hold a sign. You are the sign. It’s the perfect job for cripples.  Even the comatose can do it.

But it could also be a nightmare. I don’ think cripples will have any say over which corporation adopts and brands us. So it will be a real crap shoot and I could be sentenced to a life of wearing an embarrassing brand that turns me into a laughingstock, like American Girl or the New York Mets. And there’s no possibility of parole. Branded cripples will be like branded cattle. There’s no turning back.

So maybe I should be proactive and issue what the bureaucrats call an RFP (request for proposal). I’ll auction off the advertising expanse of my chest and see if I can get a corporate bidding war going.

I shouldn’t allow myself to take part in such a degrading practice as becoming a human billboard. I have to salvage at least some of my pride. So I think I’ll just turn tricks.

Street Crimes

I don’t know if cripples are more susceptible to street crime or not. All I know is I’ve been a victim of a street crime twice. And the second instance was far more traumatizing than the first.

The first might technically be categorized as a zoo crime by those who keep crime statistics. I was at the zoo with my late wife, Anna. We were checking out the Birds of Prey exhibit. I felt someone bump hard against my wheelchair and then a loud voice said, “EXCUUUUUUUUUUSE ME!”

At the time I had a leather tool bag hanging on the side of my chair, the kind people who work with tools hang on their belts. It was a good receptacle for the things I carried around, like pens and writing pads and a comb and gum and stuff like that.

On this day I got careless and tossed a five-dollar bill in there and there it was as plain as day. A male hand reached in and snatched it. Why he felt obliged to politely and loudly excuse himself before stealing from me I don’t know.

The guy took off running. Being that it was only five bucks, I should have just let it go. But when these things happen, you don’t think straight. You feel so insulted and violated.

So I screamed, “STOP HIM! HE TOOK MY MONEY!! And it just so happened there were two nearby guys who must’ve been professional linebackers because they were big and they were fast. They ran after the perpetrator and were closing in fast when he threw down my money, held up his hands to show they were empty, and ran off. One of the linebackers picked up the five, looked at it and then looked at me with a combination of bewilderment, irritation and pity. All that for a lousy five bucks? The way I was screaming like a little girl with her ponytail caught in the car door, you’d think that guy had snatched the Hope Diamond from my tool bag.

The linebacker returned my recovered funds. The end.

The second street crime occurred in the French Quarter of New Orleans. It unfolded in much the same way, except this was more like an assault.

Our hotel doorman warned Anna to hold on tight to her purse since Bourbon Street is infested with pickpockets and snatchers. So Anna stuffed her purse up under her legs and literally sat on it in her wheelchair.

We rolled down Bourbon Street. A man ran toward us through the crowd. We knew we were his target. It all happened so fast, yet it seemed to happen in slow motion. The man reached toward Anna and we were horrified when we saw what he had in his hand! It was a five-dollar bill! He dropped it in Anna’s lap and took off running.

This heinous crime occurs every day somewhere, but it only happens to cripples so nobody keeps statistics on it.  You’re sitting minding your own business when somebody suddenly drops a buck or two in your lap or some change in your coffee cup. They strike without warning. And before you can say, “Hey, I’m not a beggar, dammit!” they’re gone. And the pain of your victimization is accentuated by the fact that it’s always such a pissy little amount of money. Like scoring some spare change is supposed to make your day!  I’m not saying I’m so pure that I don’t have a price. Maybe if someone dropped three or four grand in my lap, I wouldn’t bitch. I’d swallow my pride for the greater good. But the problem is, no one has ever remotely put me to the test. It’s always a pissy little insulting amount.  I’m hoping someone someday will present me with a real moral challenge.

Being that it was only five bucks, I should have just let it go that night on Bourbon Street. But when these things happen, you don’t think straight. You feel so insulted and violated.

So I screamed “STOP HIM! HE GAVE US MONEY!!” But there were no linebackers this time. The perpetrator disappeared into the crowd.

I still haven’t recovered. I know that sicko is probably still out there somewhere, lurking, biding his time, waiting to similarly assault another unsuspecting cripple.