I am Matthew

He came to get me last night and all of my stuff was in the trunk of the car. I was wheeled out in a chair that was no General Lee, my leg tucked underneath me and George Bush scratched at my skin from beneath. He laughed when the wind took my gown upwards from my waist and exposed me. The boy with the balls. My penis didn’t hang enough to touch the chair’s faux leather seat. All my stuff from the hospital, and from home. It was Foot’s car. Foot’s my Aunt’s ex-boyfriend who my Mom is still friendly with and I saw her tongue when she kissed him. I thought of my shower. I thought of my brother and the brave men of the services. I yelped inwardly and dug a finger into my crotch bag. Foot threw me into the car on top of my gear and we drove in the wrong direction. Dr. Spinach said me and my Mom needed a “spacial redefinition of our relationship” so I’m at Foot’s it seems. Foot has a dog and a daughter who does not live with him, but who I’ve seen around. She is bruised. Mr. President snarled in my knee pit and slapped my skin. And mine ears whispered failure. I thought that if I died on Foot’s watch I’d be someone and he’d be in trouble. I slapped at my throat to get the ears to cease and I kicked at the door. It flung open and I hurled myself to the road, but the door swung back and stopped my headlonging. Foot laughed and I looked and my leg was flapping outside. It was as though the car had a wang. I thought of my new bolt plastic bagged in the boot and 24 Hour Girl, who never visited. We passed the store and I made a GNNNNEEEEHHNNNN noise as I tried to show her my things through the window. My leg hit a mailbox and snapped inside, kicking my own balls. Foot has a nice house at least. He lives not too far from the store. He has a pool, but it’s got no water. I took a pad and pencil from mom’s purse and scribbled. Here’s what I scribbled:

CarS wang of myne balls, hedlong. RubBer fleschy tube of me and yOu stay offhnnn hhyyerrrr. I am at Foot, the wateer is drry and they say Redbutt NM.

I slipped the pad down the back of the seat. She will look in time. In my Mom’s purse was some hand cream, and when she kissed Foot again, this time goodbye, I began.

The hospital isn’t so bad. They pumped my stomach of the Tylenol, orange peels and embarrassment. It smells like defeat when I am sat by the nurse and I shit my shame out into a bed pan she has to hold. From the drip in my arm to drippings in the bowl, I am a fleshy tube. Mom got me this laptop and cried when she gave it to me. Even this room isn’t so bad. I thought asking the nurse to smell my cheesy biscuit would land me in more trouble. They just took me off the ward to protect the ears of the children from my faecal mouth. I know the doctor laughs at me. He’s sewn up people who got closer than me. I didn’t float, I saw no lights, my life stood as still as it always does. I was simply found vomiting and blind. But alive. Very alive. When I got my eyes back I was being probed facially by a pipe with black liquid. A tube of water in my anal cavity too. The pipe slid between the gap where my front teeth used to be. A nurse cried out and puked when my bolt was removed. Green liquid spurted from cleanlinesslessness and somebody said, isn’t that the kid with the balls? The transistor fell and smashed and beeped.
I know the doctor laughs at me. I wish I was dead. Then I’d be somebody.

When I awoke they made me dance for my supper in no more than an old police jacket. My knee squeaked, rusty from the water, the anklet beeped when I bounced and my penis slapped my legs. They laughed and slid a burger to me. It was ok, slightly bland, needed onions and a finger wiping. I wonder if she got her wiener. I left her a good one, fully fingered. It only needed 3 minutes. She has 1440 in her 24 hours. Surely she can spare some for me. When I slept, they said, I was curled up foetal-like, they said it looked like I was shitting my balls out. They polaroided it and stuck it up on their notice board outside. A crowd had gathered they said, the boy with testicle turds, they jeered. My sore anus was on show, fingernailed bloody. “Redbutt N.M”, someone wrote beside the photo, I was told through the bars. I have two red lines on my forehead from the banging. They eventually put me in a chicken wire cage, for the drunks. They took the old masturbator out, for his own safety, they told him. They set him loose and he exposed himself to the crowd by the photo and ran yelping up the street. I heard him from my cage. He sounded like the bull. He sounded like a part of my night terror recording. He sounded like me.

They heralded my exit from the station with a fanfare from a loud speaker and the crowd formed a jeer line. Through the corridor of snarling faces and wagging digits were Mom and Dr. Spinach. An old lady made a grab for me. She wanted to see the balls. I showed her, and Mom and Spinach. I held the jacket in my teeth and spun. I am the festival bull. I was placed in the police car horizontal and I curled up. It looked like I was shitting my balls out, someone pointed out. My bolt jabbed the leather seats. I heard someone choking on their laughter as we pulled away.

It wasn’t me by the way, Mikey’s eye. Turns out he had a thing about maggots.

I fell asleep on Friday with my face stinging. Scratches and tears and spittle. Some vomit. I had spent the hours since returning from Live Big! screaming and scraping my face and the white from my walls with my fingernails. Now the walls and face are red streaked. I have two fingernails, halved, the others standing up rather well to the abuse. I fell asleep, exhausted. I finally came from the bed this morning. I showered and changed my knee oil. Mom helped me into the shower, but refused to turn on the water when I refused to tell her where the transistor is. She left and I did what I do. The truth is I have fashioned a small attachment from wire hangers for my knee hinge. The transistor sits nicely. Nobody looks at my knee. The anklet weighs heavy, but is never farther than six inches from the transistor. The length of my protracted shin bone. My room stinks of the four sleeps of a man. I hung the sheets, soiled with the soilment of four days, from my window. I’m awake, I say. Mikey’s tree house was taken down. With no depth perception, he kept reaching for branches that were three inches farther away than he thought. The tree was also cut down. “You did it” the voices gurgle in mine ear, and I hear them above the wood chippers.
I decided it was time to see her. The fires have settled, even though the sweat drips from all pits with the sun baking. I like her air conditioning. 24 hours a day. Does she know it was me? I used the sheets as a rope out of the house. I wiped the shit and piss on Ferguson’s drying underwear and hopped towards the 24 hour Mini Mart, a brown streak down my front and chin. My anklet was nicely obscured by my baggy pyjamas, though my bolt had torn a hole the size of an eyeball. Three blocks from the store there is a ditch with running water downhill where I had an idea. I lay in the brown sluice and held my breath. I began to float. The water was too shallow and my back kept dragging the ground mud. I gave up and was wet with decaying water and debris. My bolt seized and I dragged my leg into the Mini Mart, trailing brown. My Wads can was gone, or possibly upturned. I checked each for foot flakes, but, even scattered about the store I could see no open foot spam. 24 hour girl was not there. The bliss of her silence matched only by my disappointment at her absence. I think I despise her again, sort of. I climbed over the counter to see where she was hiding and why she hadn’t answered my letters. I wrote on the floor. I wrote:
“Quiet by me and I see no flakes, I’m awake”
I wrote this in ketchup.
The police slipped in this dragging me away. She will never get the message. I left her a wiener in the microwave, raw. She can set the timer when she gets in. It will be ready in 3 minutes if the power is not tampered with.

I'm home.

My room is white now, my closet gone, my bed covers white, by bed chrome. It reeks of disinfectant. It smells like a hospital. The fires have stopped and the kennel has called to say I'm fired. My orange peels and anal drippings have disappeared. My computer cleaned to sparkle grey. The hard drive seems intact. Mom greeted me home with a chunky bracelet I have to wear on my ankle that beeps when I get 500 yards from my living room. It says "Safelet"on it. In the living room is a small transistor. Earlier I went for a walk after tightening my bolt and realigning my legbone to see how far I'd get. It appears that 500 yards is 3 blocks from 24 hour girl's house, but can reach to the end of Mr. Ferguson's garden, and into Miss Dannaway's kitchen. She screamed when she saw me digging in the butter. What I hate now is not the beeping. The incessant beeping if I break my barrier. It's that I have to carry that fucking transistor everywhere to stop it. With the Safelet on leg and transistor in arm I can go anywhere. I've hidden the transistor now. Mom cried and I wagged my penis at her. Mom has never mentioned the closet, nor anything she cleaned fromt he room. Nor the green stain spreading across the wooden floor. Has she noticed my hair has grown back some? Probably, just doesn't mention it. Mikey's eye had to be removed. The infection could have gone brainward they said. Lose the eye he said, Mr. Ferguson.
When I hear the voices behind mine ears, they say "You did it". I slap my throat when they say that. I slap their voices shutfaced.

When the bull catches fire it does squeal. I know it does.

A Live Big! orderly, or, “facilitator” as they are called, fainted and was hospitalised after he walked into my quiet room to check on me. Whether it was the smell of the wall shit and floor piss or the sight of me, naked and rubbing me on the computer screen screaming and slapping my own shoulder with my chin, or what he saw on the screen underneath my person, I don’t know. Probably a mix of the three unpleasantries.
They’ve arranged for me a room out of the building. It’s an old prefab with a sink and a bed. I’m to use to woods for my toileting needs, although, as one of the facilitators jibed, I could just put it on the walls. Urine goes on the floor, I told him, leaving only a yellow streak, like a child’s blow-painting. Dr. Spinach has called for my Mom to come get me. She says I’m a disturbing influence on participants and facilitators alike. I feigned disappointment by smacking my groin and pulling at my eyebrows for a minute or two, until I was restrained. I’m banned from group. I’ve had no word from 24 Hour girl. The less I see her the more I like her. My despise of her voice and vagina take a backseat to her Spam and 24 Hours. The second note I sent went like this

p.s. Address not as was, is now as is…Live Big! Durango, CO.

I tied it to a field mouse’s tail and threw it in the direction of home, with the strict instructions to go straight to the house by the flames, Albuquerque, N.M. I’ll most likely be going home tomorrow now anyhow. See how my Spam is growing. I may go to the final resting place of the General Lee. The charred woods by her house over a dead racoon. Mom said she was going to fix up my room while I was gone. She probably shouldn’t look in my closet.
I wonder if the kennel will fire me for absenteeism? Only second Saturday supposed to go and I’ve reneged. Not my fault what with Live Big! and all, but they might not see it that way, the dogs. I called them and left a message, but my screams were unsense even to me. They probably didn’t get me.
The pictures I took with my digital camera that Mom got me after my post birthday fit, of my anus, finger punctured, and of a cock wash session, insensed Dr. Spinach after I made paper airplanes of the print outs and threw them out of the window during morning prayer. Screams like torn cats filled mine ears. I made an EEEEEEEEEE sound and drummed my belly while hopping and flapping in the window.
I used the look on Spinach’s face later with my erection in my fist.

Live Big! Has a quiet room where we go to sit and think about what we’ve done. It kind of looks like my bedroom, but without the bubble wrap and the faecal mountain in the corner. (Slightly chopped due to the bag full I took with me). This room has the computer I’m using now, but it has many firewalls. Porn is unavailable. Blogs they like, because they say it’s “using the power of technology to cleanse the self”. I feel no cleaner. I’ve taken my clothes off and hung them out of the window as a kind of protest. My shit smears the walls around me. Well, when I say mine, I mean it in a kind of possessive way. I’ve smeared the shit I brought with me all over the walls. I’ve been here ten minutes. I’m supposed to think about my actions at group today. I’ve thought about them. I wish I’d been able to get the boot open so I could crack my face flap off the highway before we got here. That’s what I think of my actions. I wish I’d never been alive to do them. I’ve written 24 hour girl a letter. I caught a wood pigeon and attached the paper to its head, kind of sticking up like a plume. Then I told it where to go and it took off. It went in the wrong direction as far as I could tell, but I assume he was circling.
The note went like this:

You have a nice voice. And ass. I like your 24 hours and my Spam can. Despise too. My flame hard on you…with the general. See it all. Live Big! They say and I see the highway on my way. Face flap smack crack. I’m the Albuquerque festival bull. I’m in the quiet room and you shouldn’t say things with your voice. Got kennel job, smeared it on my walls. Erection out in group, you see? Have to think now.

I’m yours.

Matty.

I hope it gets to her.

When we travel I sit in the back with the dog behind some chicken wire while my brother reclines on the back seat. Sometimes the car vibrations give him wood. He touches it. They’re taking me to Durango, CO., Dr. Spinach’s “Let’s live big! Retreat”. We leave the burning skyline of Albuquerque tonight and my 24 hour girl too. My left ear is half-skinned and my right one is more like a red squash ball after being trapped in the trees for 3 hours, dangling. The General was no more than a shell when it eventually crashed out of the tree ashes, landing on an inquisitive racoon. I was given one crutch to replace my General Lee. My knee bolt is bent and the rubber has fused to my knee-skin, fixing my leg at an obtuse an unusual angle. It points forward like a semi-erect enormous wang. It bobs when I hop. I’ve been to Live Big! Before. I was sent home early for terrorising a local farm girl. They said putting foot-longs in my pants and hopping after her salivating was “unbecoming a Live Big! Participant” (That’s what they call us, participants)
I think I’m going to throw myself against the highway once we hit 100 kmph.