“So there I am having these disgusting convulsions on the filthy, trash-filled pavement and Cantaloupe isn’t paying attention. It wouldn’t matter if she was, since the fat-assed nurse doesn’t know the difference between a seizure and a salami sandwich. Anyway, this woman, who’s supposed to be my nurse, who’s supposed to be keeping an eye on me, who’s supposed to wipe the snot from my nose and clean out the corners of my eyes, who’s supposed to be rubbing off the drool from my chin so I don’t look like the old damn fool I am, who’s supposed to be getting rid of the dried spit that’s lying on my cheek and the gross booger that’s been dangling from my right nostril for the past twenty minutes, Cantaloupe won’t be doing any of those things. She won’t be paying the slightest bit of attention to me, not even when I’m lying there twitching my ass off in the gutter that I’ve bounced into on the corner of Sixty-third and Lexington Avenue. My alleged nurse Esmeralda or Restituta, or whatever the hell her name is, doesn’t care. My big-ass beauty in the white uniform doesn’t give two shits that I’m doing the Saint Vitus’ dance up and down Sixty-third Street. Why? Because my nurse Begonia or Fantasia or something will be messing around with some hip-hopping dude named Snoop Kitty Ditty or Twelve Dollar ’N Six Cent who just walked up to her and made nice-nice. She’ll be playing teasie-weasie with him, not the slightest bit concerned that I’m jerking around in the street like someone being electrocuted. Nor will she care that taxis are swerving this way and that trying not to run over me or that a line of New Yorkers are stepping over my half-dead butt so they can make the traffic light.

“So there I am almost a corpse lying on the filthy pavement when finally my alleged nurse in the white uniform turns around and sees me. I’m about to croak. My glazed eyes have glazed over. My rancid tongue hangs out of my gaping mouth like an exhausted hound dog. And what will Pocahontas’s final words to me be before I slide into the big black chasm? The decisive and irrefutable sentence I shall carry with me to the bottomless pit? To the worms and grubs who will reduce my once dapper bod to a pile of moldy bones?

“It will be this: ‘Shit, man! Why’d you go and do that for?’”

The cripple returned to his bed and considered the producer, who was due any minute. The odd thing is, he reflected, I’ve always wished that hotshot load of crap would cross my path. Something told me he was the one, the only person who would get my program idea done. Well, my prayers have come true, mused the cripple. At least some of them. The mean-spirited, conniving prick should be here soon.

And then the buzzer sounded.