Call It Sleep

Susan Hayward would die from a brain tumor twelve years after doing Stolen Hours, a remake that contributes very little to the conversation between the melodrama of mortality and the banality of turning cadaver. Party girl more than actress, yet one projection Hayward carries through is the vivacious defiance of will in the face of the insurmountable, never inhabiting her characters so much as flinging her impertinence at her audience, the 63 film is a cheap sham, a meager Kennedyesque decollage that follows the Davis model with unnecessary religiosity, indicative of the fact that we're impatient with video of medical model treatment and remission, cleaning up after chemotherapy vomit, or knowing everything, like Lance Armstrong, the disgraced paragon, or knowing nothing, or knowing what physicians think the pathology indicates.

We all decline, a word I got from my follower, Edward, when I met him in the community room for coffee. He was casual about the fact that Trudy Richardson sent up an assessment team to my unit at a most vulnerable moment, with Debra Horne and I threatening each other, the entire building knowing about it within minutes. I was not *declining* in 2007. The entire system imploded over my head. Keystone Mercy had dropped me as a carrier because I was Medicaid ineligible. The Liberty Resources case manager cannot handle anything not compliant with Medicaid spend down. The only resource I had was my mother's brother, an executive at a medical equipment carrier, but I had to pay him.

The renovations that Erik von Schmettering and Jimmi Shrode, as a piteous LBGT couple and zealous advocates, foisted upon Presbyterian Homes, traumatized me, as did the mixed race nursing aid who hit on me two years earlier. She would have probably told the police she was just attempting to console me rather than putting me in an episode of Orange is the New Black, but I am cognizant of what a lesbian move is, tried to force myself to an orgasm after the sense of violation, couldn't climax, and let a trigger move me to my always incessant tears, periodic and overwhelming. I rarely masturbate on any masochistic submission fantasy anymore. A healthy sexual relationship is a bad romance-- or Hayward's mature coitus with her strong men imagined off screen. She never transforms, Hayward, whatever her role, or her age, she is the noble pioneer female, taking a punch like a brass tack, dying hard, sometimes with irony.

Now I am declining, but what I cannot accept is that I've been forced to eat rust my entire life, brutal youthful surgeries which improved nothing and maybe I did not need, and that one other strong woman with cerebral palsy humiliated me beyond my ability to recover, after lifelong threats to my survival, the erosion of my dignity. I want them dead, the prominent members of ADAPT I came up with, because the paradigm needs to change, and no one is lifting a finger. Jimmi talks on his cell in his thick footed sandals and ignores me, this fearsome advocate who is as progressive for broken bodies as the holy grail, but sniggers at everyone, with Erik, behind their backs. A transvestite and his fat homosexual partner know the truth, and individuals like me, those who thought we could make a rewarding life, career, are fools. This is what their advocacy and activism, willingness to engage in fraud, amount to, and it is why gay marriage advocates, and more prominent progressives, are fooling themselves with the persuasive arguments posited under the equal protection clause.

Mainstream conservatives have given this up, and even I see it is inevitable, but what stems forth from it will invariably lead to more complications, and I'll be declining, dribbling with incontinence, getting a pressure sore dressed. I'd rather be a terrorist, even a suicide tourist, going blind in my last moments, fade to black.