We're in a weird motel...the indie version

During the late Jurassic age, I taught elementary art to get my teacher's certificate. Humping more supplies than a hundred dollar mule, I schlepped from school to school and met the wee ones. No mistake, these were tough rooms, so as an opener I'd asked the same question. How old are you inside? The six year olds were a bust, since that's a surreal age anyway. "I'm a bone," I remember one of them saying. "Just a big ol' bone."

It's a good question though. I happen to be 26 inside. How about you? And here's another. Where do you live? If, by temperament, circumstance, or a really bad smack habit, you live outside this culture, then you are, in effect, a Navajo. Being a blanket-wearing Navajo isn't too bad because you can see that everyone around you is bleeding from the ears over a construct that has no reality: arsisiety, I call it. Arsisiety is made up of newspaper snippets, chunks of blogging, staticky radio noise, talking heads on TV, and lots and lots and lots of colored pictures. And that's all.

But arsiety has a lot to say about airline tragedies, small children, Internet porn, and the durable horror of a dire medical prognosis.

So far only a few friends have ventured over to see me in my omnipresent Chucks, latex gloves, a sexy dab of Clorox behind each ear. As to the folks on the phone, their heads are totally full of arsiety doomsday ghastlyhood. Still, they seem to know all they need to. Oh, my God. How are you going to do this? There's no way you can take care of him. It's impossible. You've got that artificial hip. And at your age.

(Go screw yourself. I'm 26 inside.)

So, a girl walks into a room and Mistah Stroke opens his eyes and says, I got my keys and my tackle,and he holds out his hand to show me a nasal spray, his Primatene, and a plastic ruler from our auto insurence. S'all I need, he says. And the girl says, "Groovy. Time to change your catheter." And Mistah Stroke moans, But there's no one left. Where is everyone? Ohdear, Ohdear, Ohdear, Ohdear, Ohdear. And the girl says, "They're all making Halloween costumes. Lift up your butt." And she whips off his XL Depends. And Mistah Stroke says, Oh no, oh no, oh no. They're all gone. Everyone's gone. They'll get us too. And the girl says, "Bullshit. Roll this way." The girl says bullshit a lot.

So she puts down the waterproof pad, trades out his suave leg catheter for the giant flabby nightime catheter, gaffer-tapes it to the bed, puts anti-fungal ointment on his butt, powders him with lemony Mexican talc and whips on a new pair of Depends and yanks down his tshirt. Then she takes his blood pressure and his blood sugar. Mistah Stroke pronounces both excellent. "Bullshit," says the girl, scribbling down numbers. "Blood sugar is way high, blood pressure isn't great either."

You got a pen? asks Mistah Stroke asks her. "Yeah, why?" says the girl, holding hers up. For when they sign everything over to you. After I'm gone. "Nobody's signing dookie," says the girl, "we got shit to do." What? What? What can we do? There's no time. No time, Mistah Stroke wails a thin high wail. They've got us. We're so little. We're just so little. "You gotta get ready for Neuro-Rehab," says the girl. "That's like the rehab Olympics." Mistah Stroke brightens up considerably. The Olympics? he asks, looking pleased. I had no idea."That's you, bub," says the girl, giving him a peck. "Olympics all the way."

And that's one night down.

How do you like your blue-eyed boy now, Mistah Stroke?

Baylor Rehab people are great on setting goals, even when those goals are tiny and creep out us more abled types. My goal is to know when I'm going to crap. My goal is to roll my chair to the short bus. My goal is to clean my dick. And, don't get me wrong, I salute all goal-setting and a victorious climb to the summit from base camp.

This cheerful can-do thinking can leak into us bedraggled caretakers too. Me, my goal is to search out Mistah Stroke and beat him with a frying pan until he looks like a mashed peach. But I probably shouldn't add it to the optimistic scrawlings on the white board installed in our newly rearranged home. The eighteen pounds of stroke reading Baylor piled in my arms mentions that there will be a change in emotions.

I imagine my funny witty boy is in there somewhere and maybe he can dig out. Sometimes I can even see him flickering like a candle in my hub's eyes. In the meantime, as the literature says, a flat-voiced entity, prone to fury has taken over, equipped with lousy judgement and the self-centeredness of a toddler. "Why haven't you picked up my shirts from the cleaner's?" Mistah Stroke demands. Because you can't walk, or button it, or have a place to wear it, and I'm too fucking tired, I answer in my echoing head, but I say, "I had other shit to do" and Mistah Stroke glares at me. "Like what?" And I don't say that I get up at 7 AM and keep running until 12 PM, when I write, pay bills, and watch drops of sweat land on my calculator. "Just a buncha shit," I say, in what I hope is a kindly voice that my boy might recognize.

Mistah Stroke requires catheter changing, 3 + large special salt-free, sugar-free carefully balanced meals, blood sugar readings, blood pressure readings, sponge baths, haz-mat waste disposal, swabs of antibiotic on a pressure point, Gold Bond Powdering, chair lifts and transfers, pillow shiftings, and clothing changes.

I require a nights sleep.

I took a nap this evening and woke to screaming. COME IN HERE RIGHT NOW! GODDAMNIT I KNEW IT! THIS ISN'T GOING TO WORK! I DIDN'T KNOW WHERE YOU WERE FOR AN HOUR AND A HALF AND WHAT WAS I SUPPOSED TO DO? AND THERE YOU WERE IN FRONT OF LAW&ORDER. YOU ALWAYS GO TO SLEEP IN FRONT OF LAW&ORDER. THIS IS A BIG FAIL. A BIG FAIL.

So I cried for a while and then got Mistah Stroke ready for bed. We ended the day like we began it, Mistah Stroke and me: in complete lunacy. He was up bright and early this AM. And when I dragged my weary ass in, he told me he was worried about all the money we owed Led Zepplin. "We do?" I asked, brightening some, wondering if I'd been living a more exciting life than in my current tar pit. "Yes," Mistah Stroke said, firmly, "and I'm worried." "I'll figure it out," I told him when I returned with his lumberjack's breakfast, which I plopped in front of him. I drank a Red Bull as he chewed moodily, then remarked grudgingly, "The food's better than in the hospital. Maybe it's better here." Maybe.

You have to take care of yourself, say the well-meaning voices. I'm given nice lotions and a candle. Pamper yourself, say the voices, as I throw the 18th wash in and scrub down two bathrooms with Clorox ala the infection-fighting pamphlet from Baylor. I've got other things on my mind besides fun pedicures, believe me.

I like to think about owing money to Led Zepplin, though. Rockers trump rehab every time.

Chop water, carry wood...

The Homestead

"Chuck Taylors," the bodyguard-sized black guy, remarked approvingly, glancing down at my feet. We were sharing an elevator at the Baylor Institute for Rehabilitation. He wore khakis, a Baylor-issued polo shirt with Baylor Rehab stitched over the tit, and enormous cross-trainers.

"Yeah," I told him proudly. "I can do anything in my Chucks." And stuck up one foot so he could check it out.

"I know that's right," he said, grinning.

It's right and it's true. When facing a gruesome job (frightening kid diseases, vomit, cat shit, horrible glop in the refrigerator) my sister always says, "I can do anything in rubber gloves." With me it's Chucks. Once I'm laced up I'm ready for serious rock n' roll. My mini-encountor in the elevator cheered me up. I was wearing my Buddha t-shirt, tight dirty jeans, and a hoodie in honor of Training Day with the Team and the black guy was obviously hip. I'd be assisting a person twice my size, half of him inert as public sculpture.

The black guy was certainly hipper than the lady with concrete hair, gold shrimp earrings, a $$$$$ suit, and foot-killer heels, when we encountered one another in the elevator at the Roberts Tower. She looked me up and down as I sagged grayly against the elevator controls. At the time, Lynn was in ICU, I had the Swine 'flu and was chugging between two hospitals, the house and drug store, and I had on my Awful Life uniform (see above) in honor of The Horror Show, and my attitude was as advertised.

"I looked like you in junior high," the lady told me.

"So flame on," I said, getting out on my floor. If I came on like an old badass, offending all and sundry, then avert your eyes muthafuckahs.

But this particular day, getting off on the 3rd floor, I spotted Lynn stretched out on the bed, wearing his navy scrubs, looking like the old athlete he is, and grinning his new lop-sided grin. And then suddenly the Team piled in. There was Speech Therapy, Occupational Therapy, Physical Therapy, Lifestyle Counseling, plus two or three I can't remember, and they all seemed young, well-adjusted, determinedly nice, with a kind of Lutheran Youth Group vibe and smelled like hand sanitizer. Each therapist addressed Lynn one by one, rattled off the goals he'd met, and predicted a stunning comeback. My boy, it seems, had worked his half-paralyzed ass off and this hoo-hah was a valedictory and graduation.

Perhaps it was a graduation too soon, I thought, trying to fathom the directions on a Foley catheter, while Lynn snarled, What's the problem? from his bed. The problem was that he was home and I was up to my chapped elbows in Baylor reading materials, scary-looking equipment, and a long list of arcane quandaries.

Even wearing my Chucks, I felt queasy. He had to have a glucose reading in the AM and PM, and our glucose-monitoring stuff was out of date and the unidentifiable battery was fritzing. His carbs had to be counted at every meal and each meal had to weighed and measured out, then recorded.His catheter was a leg device in the AM and putting it on was like putting clothes on a raccoon for sheer impossibility. The PM catheter held no joy either. His shoulder brace looked like a bondage freak's delight and everything I picked up was made out of velcro. He had eight separate perscriptions of which we had only two and lots of calls to make to the charge nurse at Baylor and the two other pharmacies involved in the fuck-up. Lifting him up was impossible and, lying on his back, he ate most meals with his fingers and all my blessings.

By two in the morning I was face down on the bed, still wearing my clothes, feeling I'd been beaten with a pair of cast-iron xylophone sticks. And that's all I remember.

Sunday was better, but that's a whole other radio show.

Mom's Sonic Boom Atomic Apple Pan Dowdy...

Click "Submit Abuse" if you feel this post is inappropriate. Explain why below if you wish.

Cancel

Friday night I ate dinner in the bathroom, which seemed weird but there was no one there to comment. I was gnawing on the roast chicken I'd bought a couple of days before, but my cats frothed into Chicken Madness with such ferocity that the Big Chicken and I fled to the john. As I hung over the sink, tearing at a thigh, I could hear sounds of gnashing and howling just outside the door, like animal mutants from some sleazebag gore fest. I ignored them.

Chewing on the ass end of a chicken was a celebration. I'd coaxed my elderly Benz with its all its fearsome nuh-nuh-nuh sounds from greasepit to grease pit before winding up at Faustino's Transmission Repair. There, with the TV jammed on a blaring Mexican channel and a small beautiful child asleep on an oily couch, the Universe delivered me to a shop where the mechanics truly knew their shit. I got to stand under the carraige and, with a guy pointing things out, I actually eyeballed the three dripping seals and dented pan signaling an apocolyptic tranny burn-out. They couldn't do it that very day, but they poured in two quarts of oil and said I'd be okay until Monday.

On Saturday my dear pal called me to say he could cut my hair afterall, and I blew a kiss to God and all his crazy angels. This never happened during hippie days, when I actually wanted my hair down to my ass, but now in my declining years, my hair has turned into something kudzu-like. I was moving toward dreads as a clear next-stage.

"Oh, my God," my friend said, when I climbed out of the car. He looked pretty awestruck himself .

"I know, I know," I said. "I look like a goddamned troll-doll. Then happily settled on his fold-out high kitchen stool, I suggested, "Maybe cut to the middle of my neck."

"You'll get it cut the way I fucking cut it..." he started bitterly, yanking a comb through my raggedy multi-colored mane.

"...and I'll like it," I finished. I know how these things work: the kindness of others, that is.

Two weeks ago, Lynn's work place delivered three oozing file-boxes full of hot food. When I tore one open I stared down at a fatty pork chop casserole floating in oil, canned vegetables, and mushroom soup, next to it was a plastic container full of pink rubber slabs of ham. But this is what the generous hearts of others send. You get what they like, what comforts them, and their love is the real taste of the thing. I wonder how many Poor Souls have smacked their lips over my Super-dooper Gazpacho Tastee Delight. Probably they've sighed deeply, wondering why I sent over a jug of iced down V-8 juice with crap floating in it.

We do our best, you and I. We do our best.

Sunday, another old friend hauled my wild ass over to Baylor. My boy had called me the morning before, while I stared dully into space, wondering why he was calling on the phone when we lived in the same house. This is something I do every morning, and I'm so glad I'm not a widow. If I were, no doubt his naggy ghost would haunt my every waking hour, like some sorrowful mirage of loss.

"This is extremely important," he said impatiently. "Write this down."

"Okay, okay," I said, scrabbling for my pen, still hoping he'd hurry up and come down the hall to get his coffee.

"When you come on Sunday, I need you to bring the clippers. I need to get all these Old Guy whiskers off. Got that? Next, I need the nose-hair clippers. I've got one that that's like four feet long."

"Gotcha," I said. And all day Saturday, I wondered if I could shave him because I never have, but I decided I'd give it a shot. I remembered myself with my broken hip, staring at my chipped toenail polish, my scaly heels, wanting to kill myself.

So Sunday, when my friend and I finally tumbled into his room like a couple of clowns, I got out all the stuff, wrapped a towel around his neck, then shaved and trimmed, not doing a great job, but doing what I could.

"You look like yourself!" I said, amazed, watching his familiar face emerge out of all that Gentle Ben shubbery.

"Stay a little longer," he coaxed.

And I did.

Alt.ending

The Public Option

Click "Submit Abuse" if you feel this post is inappropriate. Explain why below if you wish.

Cancel

Some things don't bear thinking on. Like what happens to Easter chicks and those free puppies at the mall. Or wondering uneasily about that child's shoe discarded and tumbling on the freeway? Or remembering my husband's body become wax, his skin turning loose and gray like a tattered garment, his mouth a dark O, as he realizes the ultimate betrayal of the body years before his time. His terrible awareness during the stroke: I had so many plans, and his wife's terrific rejoinder: I think we're on a whole new plan now, baby.

There's no time to brood over stuff like that. There isn't time to ruminate darkly over the mean prick at my support group who cut into my melt-down, noting prissily, Other people would like to talk too. There's no time to take satisfaction at the numbers of my group who shot him deathray looks, or for me to construct a stylish grouping of you-have-a-little-dick remarks to be delivered later and savagely. Nor is there time to take to my bed for a satisfying weepy escape, clutching a bouquet of radiology and ambulence bills to my soft breasts. I'm operating in 15 minute intervals now. and everything depends on other things.

The Benz is still mouldering bleakly in the garage, a victim of contingencies.The Iraqi garage-guys are close to me but still too far to walk home, and everyone I know is too booked up to take me . Then a friend calls me and she can do it, but only tomorrow. I'd told Lynn yesterday, I might have to miss seeing him, and his voice flooded with tears, Really? Then I realized I could grab a Cowboy Cab and get to Baylor that way, and I said, I'll be there, darlin'. Because isn't that what I actually promised 31 years ago?

There are my pals to contact, thank, and dissuade, like the guy who promises he can be in Dallas within 24 hours, bringing two ten ton army trucks, full of water, food, guns, and ammo. Me highly tempted to say either Jesus Christ! or Absolutely! picturing army vehicles rumbling down the freeway here, helocopters circling above the traffic like jumbo buzzards, then quietly deciding that he and I must have a talk, maybe quite soon, over his world destruction fantasies. There's my cookie-factory owning friend who promises clear bubbles of his pricey dough to Lynn's room for nurse-bribing purposes.

There's money to be lined up, payments to be arranged, put-off, and rescheduled. Me glancing nervously at the incoming bills, then recalling the wife of a client who perfectly fufills the biblical Good Woman ideal, with a modern twist. For she riseth at dawn, to upchuck bulemically and rag on the pool guy. Then, for her childs' sakes, she swoopeth upon insurence companies, to shriek at her HMO until night cometh. I make a note to call her, hoping to acquire the necessary shrew skills. I wonder if I'll be thrown upon America's only actual healthcare system: the bake sale. The one held in a windy parking lot, dirty newspapers flying around, and blown-up photos of the Poor Soul placed here and there, with fat teenagers offering a car wash as well.

There's no time to wonder about that either. But there's time, there must always be time, to hammer out an angry blog posting, as I'm drawn deeper into America's Healthcare Fun House, as I try not to bite some blank-faced functionary on the neck.

And there's time for some quick cat cuddling, as Antone Boudreau, Dickie Lee, and Lola rub around on my legs. It's not love really; it's about the roasted chicken I brought home the other night. They know I've got it stashed someplace.

That's me. Keeper of The Big Chicken.

Luck 2.0

Shitstorm 6.0

One nice aspect of living through a shitstorm is that it's kind of restful, if you think about it right. Since everything needs doing Right Goddamned Now! it doesn't much matter what you pick up and fiddle with. It needs doing. One fairly awful night, Right After, R.A. The Stroke, Lynn was convinced I was the Governor of Louisiana. Well, we're not going to have a bunch of conversation tonight, I thought brightly, and diddled with a client's website design.

I was glad I had, when the Chairman called today. "How can you do this?" he asked. "Don't you have the Swine Flu and doesn't your husband have a stroke?" I explained patiently, that down here on the 8th circle of Hell, we're not just toasting marshmallows. We're still doing shit. One thing we're not doing is the laundry however, so all my jeans have fairly serious diaper butt. But meanwhile, I'd gotten four whole hours of sleep, surrendered my will over to God, talked to a member of the reality-based community, and felt like a monster of health. Had decided if Lynn was going to die, he was going to fucking die, against my most strenuous wishes, true, but there wasn't much I could do about it. I had to float on the wings of the world and trust them.

I was now wearing my black and white Chucks, my favorite Buddha t-shirt, diaper-butt jeans and a faceful of makeup. Planned to go see my boy.

But when I wandered out to my ancient war pony, aka The 15 year old Benz, it wheezed like an old whore. For this is the Law of the Shitstorm: If It's Big And Expensive And Breaking It Will Really Fuck You Up, It Will Happen. So I knew something horrible was going on with the transmission, and was not amazed. I was just grateful I didn't need to have both knees scoped too. But I was out of catfood. Oh Jesus. Can you do just one grocery run? I asked it and the war pony's headlights gleamed seductively. Wait right there I told it and raced back to the house. Had to call my boy. I thought about breaking down in that particular part of Dallas and shuddered. I'd be barbequed and eaten in a vacant squat, probably before nightfall.

Lynn picked right up and his voice sounded good: nice and rich like it really is. "You sound great," I said. I explained about the car. "I think the transmission's going to fall out on the floor, but don't worry. I got it covered," I said figuring quickly. I could do one transmission, but not a vacuum system. But then no one can do a vacuum system. We ancient Benz owners live in dread of something going wrong with the Benz' completely insane vaccum system that transports various vital fluids and gases. We think. None of us really knows anything about it except it's totally unaffordable and you are truly SOL when it goes.

"No. Shit no. Don't come," he said thinking about empty lots, pointless murders, awful drugs, and sketchy characters too. "I showed Heidi my blog," he said. Heidi is one of the army of creamy rosy-cheeked Baylor therapists.

"You did?" I said. "What'd she think?

"Oh, she was impressed. And then I said maybe we could get the communications up to what I'm more used to."

"She was treating you like a moron," I guessed.

"Yeah. But I think it'll be okay." I bet it will, I thought. I bet old Heidi's fucking shiny white veneers fell out on the floor when she got a gander.

See, my boy has a blog with upwards of 6000 viewers daily and sometimes 10,000. It's read worldwide, with 200 readers in the Vatican alone and about 20 in some yurt in Tibet. My theory? I think he's done TV so long that he just intuitively knows what tweaks people. Plus, he's ravenously curious about everything, so it's always an interesting effortless blog. His theory? People suck. "They just like the big tits, and weird stuff I do. And anything about Miley Cyrus." Actually it was moi, your very own Writer to the Stars, that caused him to go viral.

Now at my tiny blog, with my 10-20 dog-faithful readers, I really do write about weird shit and then draw curly inferences with each hand-carved letter. So I came upon this article one day, Man Marries Pineapple, about a guy in Germany with a thing for fruit. There's stuff that's actually too weird for me, so I sent it to Lynn. He'd just started Athensboy: The View Behind Blue Eyes and was averaging about 60 hits a day, which I thought was so successful, you'd have to be a greedy bastard to ask for more.

He posted it and then fifteen minutes later, he yelled, I think I'm going viral! The two of us stood there staring at the screen, watching different parts of the world map light up. Holy Shit! we breathed.Within two hours he had 16,000 hits and it's never slacked off much since. So old Heidi can go fuck herself. She's lucky just to get to hang around him.

But we'd already had The Talk. And I'd given him my view of rehab as I'd experienced it."See, I think it's like public school.They're really aiming for a good C average joe. They don't like failures and they sure as shit don't want any A's. So if you don't want to turn into one of those old assholes on a motorized chair, with a nice black lady trudging behind you, then you gotta fight. It's a head game. When I was a patient no one listened to me and no one believed me. So I just decided I would never, never, never shut up about the horrible pain in my shoulder (turned out to be a snapped rotator cuff) and I would not answer any dumbass questions beginning with the words Are we... " I shut up abruptly. He was dealing with enough. And who was I anyway?

Then I went home and sobbed for about four hours, feeling unequal to all of it, as I always am in the face of love and loss.

On the whole, a shitty day...

Click "Submit Abuse" if you feel this post is inappropriate. Explain why below if you wish.

Cancel

I hate that word: shitty. The word itself makes my sister go nuts: there's a sense of a great rage, heaving breasts, rustling skirts, maybe a rolling pin. A 19th century fit coming right at you. She never actually does anything, but she leaves you feeling that she could be serious bad news.

My mother on hearing a single declared shit would leave the room hurriedly looking pale. Saying "shit" in my starchy Scot-Presbyterian-lawyerly family was...I don't know what it was like since I didn't know that many bad words. I thought "ain't" was a really bad word. And it wasn't like all this repression kept us from having foul, filthy mouths, although my sister keeps it clean. Like my ex-Navy dad, I swear 24/7.

"It's so relaxing," my husband told me one afternoon, when I apologized for unleashing a cartoon style string of awful words: &@#%$v9+##a6&^&."I never have to watch myself with you," he said happily enough, which is the relaxing kind of guy he is.

But some days, it's just shitty out there and no other word will do.

It's been drizzling rain so much the yard is squelchy and the cats are pissed at me. They think I control the weather and why wouldn't they? Me with the mighty light switch; me with the roaring faucets.

The swine flu settled in my chest and like a real dope, I loaded up on Mucinex last night and realized too late I was completely jacked on guiafenisen. I stayed up for the second night in a row, coughing up chunks of asphalt, old hubcaps, and greasy car parts. Then I put on a faceful of makeup, really tight jeans, and my black leather jacket and set out for Baylor, in a decidedly foggy state. I hadn't seen my boy in a while.

Thing about Baylor is it's a monster of a hospital that lives between some really good real estate and junkie-land. As I mumbled along north Washington, praying to that old bastard, God, I realized that the guy in front of me was incredibly drunk and tilting into the passenger side. The guys behind me...I guess they were guys...the windows were so darkly tinted and dirty I couldn't tell, but they seemed glued to my bumper and were driving a serial-killer van. The cops pry these fat ancient vans open after a good long lawless chase and scared kids with their underwear inside out topple out on the pavement.

But so be it. That's the way God had ordered the world this particular day. I went to the wrong rehab center first, and while the receptionist tried to call up Lynn's records, a tiny East Indian man on a glucose drip and a catheter came up to me. Blease, miss, he said politely, I need to bee. I tried to smile gently, but I know all about the need to bee and the ways of catheters. Lynn's had two bladder infections in as many days. I couldn't do a thing for my tiny Indian and this dawned on him as the nurse practitioners closed in like wolves and took him off to bee.

But another thing about today that made it unusually shitty, is that I cried. I hate crying, but if crying is called for, like over my dead cats nearly two years ago, then I will cry. I would still rather throw up in public than cry, so obviously I have all these Grief Issues. But it was today that I realized that Lynn could really die and that God, who has already gobbled up my parents, an ex-husband, my painting teacher and my two very dearest friends, might decide to grab Lynn while he's at it.

Later on I kept crying and wept over the phone tonight at my dear couple-friends. He could do it, I shouted, God could take Lynn and why not? And if God takes Lynn, I am going to be one angry bitch. The way I have to go about Acceptance is to imagine God doing his goddamn worst on me, at me. And that means I have to know Lynn could die, despite Baylor, despite me writing our way out of this mess, despite all my hopes and idiot plans, Lynn could still die. I have to really fucking know this, otherwise I'll have no peace. This may sound like a five-year-old's idea of church, but it's part of the way I write and practice. I try to imagine things as simple and stupid as they really are.

So Lynn could die.

I hate this, I yelled at my two very dear friends. He's lying in bed, looking like bleached catshit and no one has any idea that he's a really astonishing painter, and for thirty-one years, he's made me laugh every single day. To Baylor, he's just some old guy, who looks pretty fucked up. And I hate crying. I'm not a goddamn girl.

You're really not, the husband agreed calmly. You're not a girl at all. But you're a good fighter.

And I am. Except there's nothing to fight right now. There's just a bunch of events I'm trying to figure out, while my boy lies on his back, bored out of his skull.

I'll go tomorrow and see what medicines he's on, find out how to get this bladder thing licked and I'll tell him, Fuck rehab. I'm not impressed you can sit in a wheelchair and you shouldn't be either. The point is to get you out of that goddamn wheelchair. So you're gonna have to be smarter than any of these jokers. And I'll find him some of that good dry shampoo while I'm out.

We've been here before and it's a real pig of a rodeo. But it's the only one in town.

It was a really shitty day today. I'm sorry Marty, I'm sorry Mama, but some days you've got to call it just the way it is.

And it's shitty.

This Spaceship Thing We're In

Click "Submit Abuse" if you feel this post is inappropriate. Explain why below if you wish.

Cancel

The Spaceship Thing

Five years ago, it was my good fortune or not, depending on how Zen you are, to be mugged at four in the afternoon on a very bright April day. It was April 17, in fact, and I remember it well because it was one of the few times I didn't file for a tax extension.

"Hell, let's just do it right now," my income tax guy said, and we did indeed file a return on time, one that seemed a little too loosey-goosey to me. So on April 17, I'd just come out of a big box store, swinging a couple of cheap artichokes snug in their plastic bag, mostly worried about getting audited. And then I heard the sound of running very close to me, then I felt hands clamp down on my shoulders, then I was spun around to face a nicely groomed guy of about 19. To grab hold of my bag, he knocked me down and that's what broke my hip.

I remember I had a lot of thoughts lying in the parking lot, as the thief and his bf sped away. A bunch of those thoughts are still crammed in a wordy article I wrote right afterwards, because writing is what I do to keep from going nuts. My longish pensee on violence, big cities, and the importance of loud screaming was tentatively accepted by one magazine. Then, like some kind of fainting maiden I was suddenly overcome by a weird incompatible combo of exhibitionism and shyness. So I yanked my article and stuck it in a file drawer, where it still lives today.

But I can remember one of those thoughts I had on April 17: how I hated that for the next days, weeks, and months, all my conversations were going to be about This. I'd been one thing and now I was This.

It's something my husband said to me in the hospital and I knew just what he meant. "This one thing happened and now I'm all different, but I'm really not," he said through a maze of plastic tubes. He was still in ICU, wired up like a NASA project, everything bleeping, counting, and eeping.

I crawled up onto the bed. "I dunno if you are or not," I told him. "Your spaceship is kind of dented. I better check." So I looked into his eyes which, trust me here, are the exact lovely blue of old old denim. "Yeah," I said. "You're the same guy."

You need someone to tell you you're the same guy. It's something I remember.

I remember what it was like: being a collection of symptoms, being a typical This, or an atypical This, and being surrounded by lots of people who'd like you to just settle the fuck down and get with the program: being This. One of my therapists, a well-meaning woman, kept urging me to decorate my walker with plastic flowers. "Are you high?" I'd always yell. She took my horrible tempers very nicely, I must say. But then, she didn't know I was at war.

Getting well is war and don't let anyone tell you different. If you believe otherwise, you might wind up on one of those motorized chairs, cruising through the big jolly supermarket, your hair perfectly done, holding a canned ham on your lap. But that's just my idea of hell. I bet you've got your own. Whatever it is, hold onto it like a mother, swear you'll kill yourself in some forlorn ditch and let wild dogs devour your flesh before you turn into This.

And so, today, after dancing by myself to Dylan's Thunder on the Mountain, crying while I did, because the last time he and I danced was maybe the last dance we'd ever have, I thought to myself: Just quit being such an asshole.

Then I marched out to the car, drove up to the Walgreen's and bought every pen, marker, dry board, sketchbook, and flouresent felt tip I could find.

"This for you?" the clerk asked, checking me out. He already knows about the stroke. I told him yesterday.

"Nope," I said. "It's for him. He used to be an artist. It's time for him to get off his ass and be one again. And by the way, your Etch A Sketch is strictly for pussies."

We both looked at the pink Etch A Sketch. "Yeah, it is," the clerk admitted, "You still want it?"

"Sure." I said. "Any Etch in a storm."

"Did I ever tell you I had Bell's Palsy?" the clerk asked me, smiling shyly.

"Nope." I said, "And I never would have guessed."

Luck...

For no reason I can fathom, when I was young I considered myself lucky, using the term vaguely as when we say someone, generally very old or rather homely, is attractive.

Actually, the fact is that no one in my extended family is lucky, or ever has been lucky, with the exception of a single cousin. He was considered so because he managed to pay for his Yale medical training entirely through his poker winnings, was the only survivor of a horrendous car crash, married a millionaire's daughter, had six sons who each had a million dollar trust fund, lived in a cantilevered glass house in Marin and had his own vineyard. He is also stunningly handsome and extremely nice. I count him one lucky son of a bitch and I don't think too many would argue with me.

So it's a mystery I can't quite divine, this foggy sense of luck I lugged around for so many years. Perhaps, as many young people do, I confused being lucky with not being unlucky. I came from humorous intelligent parents who liked to read, which, to my way of thinking, is enough to constitute perfection. I had nice enough boyfriends, a series of terrific dogs and many good cats, travelled a bit, was a size 7 most of my life, and had naturally wavy hair. But then, as I've said, I was young.

I had not yet seen my mother die by inches of breast cancer, I had not yet lived in a freezing bewilderment as my first husband went nuts, I had not been mugged yet and gotten a titanium hip as a result, and my father had not yet fallen over with a massive heart attack.

Quite simply, life had not happened to me. Yet.

Since then, I've sat at a number of death beds, lost friends to terrible diseases, and had my own share of Bad Things but why go on? It's life, as we always say, rather oddly I think, since it's more often death. There is a consolation to all this grimness that starts piling on in middle age and just keeps coming. The consolation prize, and a good one it is, is that not much scares you. Not anymore.

So last Saturday, a week ago, in fact, when my husband of 31 years said, I feel really strange and, when I looked at him, I saw he was having a stroke. In my memory his skin is entirely gray and one half of him is pulled down like something from a horror movie. But I know enough to distrust memory. At that moment, I only knew he was having a stroke and that we didn't have much time. He could talk but not walk or use his left arm, and he didn't want me to call 911 because ambulances are so expensive. Thirty minutes had gone by with the ambulance conversation and I decided fuck it and dialed 911. Right now I'd give a lot to get those 30 minutes back. But it is what it is, as we keep saying to one another.

It's not luck exactly. But he's alive. And for me, that's quite enough.

That's a lot.