i hope it isn't polio
The searing pain in the back of my legs—feels like I'm being roasted over an open flame from my ass down to my ankles—started this morning and has only let up for moments. I had twinges of pelvic cramping yesterday, as if a giant praying mantis had pinched my genital area with its mandibles and bruised a few vital nerves, but the pain shot down into my virile stovepipe legs this morning, so intense at times that I had to shut my eyes.
I was lying there in bed thinking, "Great, now I have polio or something."
I look at someone such as Annette Funicello, a man-eating, boulder-boobed hellcat back in her post-Mousketeer prime, and how multiple sclerosis has rendered her a bony, nonambulatory human scrapheap in leg braces. The truth is sad and final: Being a cripple renders you much less fuckable. I don't want multiple sclerosis. One sclerosis I could handle—two at the max—but when they start multiplying and spreading, it becomes overwhelming.
As much as I don't want to become an unsexy cripple, it would also be unfair to the world were I join the legions of the disabled. I'd be one of those old men who'd chase after rowdy kids in my wheelchair, swinging a baseball bat at them. I'm crabby enough—please, Precious Savior, let me have my legs.
