Joshua Gaspard

By Paul O'Sullivan

Name something you can have and Joshua Gaspard probably had it. No, he didn't have outrageous diseases like Cholera or Ebola, but he had nearly everything else. For instance, he had each and every STD: Herpes, Gonorrhea, Syphilis, Chlamydia, HPV and HIV. He contracted these through prostitutes of course, because Josh was also morbidly obese: Five foot and eight inches, weighing in at four hundred and twenty six pounds. It was from this that Josh got his bad heart, difficulty breathing, bad hips, rotten feet and worthless knees.

He was a diabetic, had a scarred liver and bad kidneys that gave his body a yellow color, with the exception of the thin blue and black varicose veins that wrapped around the top of the skin. His greasy hair receded in clumps. He was missing a few fingers because of gangrene, most of his teeth from gum disease. His lazy eye was simultaneously blind. Lung cancer gave him a stretched and pulled scar and leukemia took two of his ribs on the other side of his chest.

His body was riddled with tumors. The one in his brain gave him symptoms of multiple sclerosis, frequent seizures, slurred speech and delayed response time. Untreated kidney stones, prostate cancer and his STDs made his genitals useless, and though he wore diapers, he lived alone so he rarely changed them and often sat in his own filth causing chronic infections.

The list goes on, but two things remain to be said about Josh: one; his mind was in perfect working order, which was tragic because it made him acutely aware of every one of his afflictions, their presence and pain, and two; for whatever reason he just wouldn't die. He wanted to, but his body just couldn't let go. Not because of some super power, or an intervening divine hand, but rather because of the simple resilience of life.

It all started with a bloody stool and the ulcer that caused it. He was fairly normal then, two years into his service with the Marines. The veins on his legs were only a cosmetic bother and it was assumed that the fatigue was just from too many late nights during the week. But when the results of the blood tests came back, taken on a whim by the doctor, with signs of anemia he got a bit worried. More fiber and vitamins were prescribed and strictly followed, but when his condition didn't improve, through the long process of elimination leukemia was finally diagnosed.

Honorably discharged, Josh used his GI Bill to take a swing at college, something he never imagined himself doing, but to his dismay he failed every course due to the intermittent chemotherapy. The treatment wasn't a success and after the surgery he took to his various addictions: alcohol, cocaine, church, alcohol again and finally food and isolation. Hawaiian Punch is less expensive than orange juice and iced tea less than milk.

The ferocity with which he consumed out did the damage of cancer and he gained weight quickly. Thus, the early onset diabetes and heart troubles started. It was only a year beforehand that he picked up smoking but half of his right lung had to come out anyway. Then the diseases really began to pour in. Eventually he found a crooked doctor to prescribe him the pain killers, though it's important to note that the doctor was far from crooked. Without him knowing it, Josh's name had spread quickly throughout the medical community in central Pennsylvania and the high doses were prescribed with the nodding approval and support of every understanding physician. In Josh's case it was almost the ethical thing to do.

An MRI confirmed that the blinding headaches were from brain tumors and Josh gave up. No more doctors, no more friends, no more family; just a busy mail box filled daily with food and pills of various types.

A body at rest will stay at rest, and a body in motion will remain in motion. This is how he became two separate entities. Josh, as an object, was at rest, never leaving his trailer and with no intention to; he planned resolutely to stay there and die. A body in motion will stay in motion, and the diseases of Josh's body were moving along at a steady clip. So Josh stayed put and let his addiction to garbage order pizzas and sugar water. He let his addiction to pain killers allow the cancers and other diseases to grow rapidly through his body unabated.

As mentioned previously though, one of the worst things was that he was acutely aware of everything, even behind the haze of valium and morphine taken more frequently in the cage of his migraines. Force equals mass times acceleration, and one night the pain and suffering finally hit his resting body, waking him in the middle of the night with an uncontrollable urge to act. What exactly to do he didn’t know but the diseases’ momentum had finally caught up and the next day he ordered a note pad through the mail. A few days later it arrived and he took to writing a diary, but two days in he realized it was pointless to log that he had woke up at one and watched television all day. Writing a memoir was out of the question because it only fed the fire of his clinical depression. Why would he want to remember when he was fit only to struggle moments later to move to the kitchen, or write about his first love only to attempt the math as to when he last had an erection, never mind the last time he had sex. No, he would not put himself through that.

A couple weeks later the paint arrived along with the brushes. He doubled his intake of pain killers as he used his walker to move around the trailer and throw all the litter and waste out into the lawn. He wasn't surprised to uncover well fed roaches hiding under the wrappers and plates, but he was surprised to remember that he had seen them before. His mind was clearing bit by bit. The rooms still reeked of urine and feces, but slowly they began to look like maybe they shouldn't. The pills tripled in consumption as the home began to smell like paint.

The first stroke he took was with a shaking hand, horizontally smearing a light purple line at five feet six inches from the ground. He closed his eyes and licked his gums, letting his cheeks make a vulgar sound. He opened his eyes and took another swipe. Soon a three by three square-like area was painted to the right of the television. It smelled great, and to help it dry he opened a window for the first time, and then collapsed on the floor, writhing in agony. When he woke up he closed the can, trying to ignore the film on the top of the paint and opened another. Trapped in the vessel of shooting pain, he clawed to the couch and looked beyond the television through the veil of chemicals at the splotch of color he made. He sat there and imagined colors all around it, spiraling and shooting across what looked like a moving wall, and sitting in the same position two weeks later he noticed that the vision had become a reality. It was a sort of sunburst of pastels, sharply scraped on the wall with dry brushes. The bits of dried paint that would flake off the bristles gave the faux-wood paneled wall an odd texture that he could disappear into, and when the pain in his legs made his body invisible, he would at times actually believe he was floating in an awkward sunset.

He began noticing things again. He was aware of when the mailman arrived now, and he saw that the garbage at his front step had been collected. He also knew that the wall behind the television had been filled, that his walker was in need of repair and that he tasted blood in his mouth lately. The blood didn't bother him though because it was quite possible that his mouth had been bleeding for ages and it was only recently that he had begun to perceive it, or it was due to a new growth, something he no longer worried about. His body was filled with cancerous tissue, and this new one was far from the last straw. His back had been broken years ago, so the tumor was welcomed. In spite of it he named the growth. He called it Picasso and would spit on the front door, adding blood to the list of paints he used.

Soon the front door and the wall around it was covered, and in order to continue working in the counter clockwise pattern he had been, he asked the mailman inside to help him move the couch. Josh tried of course to pull his weight, but the pains rose tremendously and he stopped to throw a fist full of pills in his mouth. The mailman, struck with confusion, moved it himself, barely able to focus on the task, as he was there looking at the local legend, the monster, its home, its pill habit and the fantastic paintings everywhere. The beast stood there, breathing, but besides that he was motionless. The delayed response time and addiction to sedatives made him seem like a docile whale gasping for breath. Josh seemed barely alive, but some how this automaton had been painting a vibrant and unique Sistine chapel.

Lamps, shelves, tables, television and screen alike, doors and windows; the living room was a kaleidoscope of absurd joy, despair and death, insanity and release. Giant breasts were splattered in a corner, an epic bottle of whiskey on the wall; the purple was the shadowed portion of a blue amputated finger. Josh had in his haze of condoned narcotics beenpainting his memoirs, the ones he refused to write. A tricycle was painted in one corner and a wheel chair the other with a twisted time line of images between. It was the next day on his rounds that the mailman realized that in opening up the last wall he was allowing Josh to paint the last chapters of his life, and out of respect for his illness and expression he told no one.

Time went by. The fourth wall was painted and the mailman was asked in again to move the kitchen table but he refused. The putrid smell was gone, true, but the sight of Josh was just unbearable, literally giving him nightmares, plus being young and naïve he imagined that he might be considered an accomplice in the coming death. Josh had been coming to the door more and more lately, and Noel, the mailman, had watched him lose over one hundred pounds in the last month. He had been bringing him alcohol, suspected he was inhaling the paint fumes, watched him double again the intake of pills and the mounds on his skull and face grow larger and weep fluid. He wondered on his drives home why Josh didn't simply ask for a gun.

Not moving the table was fine. In his daze Josh had already begun painting it. Zombie like, his one good eye's pupil would grow and then hand would slosh about making images of clouds and suns and butterflies on autopilot. Sleep was a distant memory, but so was five minutes previous. He collapsed on the table and slowly scanned his body with his mind's eye and effortlessly fell to the ground where he started pouring the eggshell paint on his body, wiping away the veins and stretch marks. He generously slapped more paint onto his clothing and face. He spit up and let the drops of blood fall back on his face, reproducing the freckles he had as a child. The paint made him feel healthy again, like a new coat of skin, so he poured more on the kitchen floor and rolled around until his back was covered. He felt the throbbing muscles and tumors cool against the thick liquid and eventually drank the paint its self for a new interior to match the exterior. He drank along with the paint every pill he had, never far away: a last ditch effort to completely wipe the slate clean, something in his insanity he actually thought would work, something that finally made sense.

When paramedics arrived a few days later at Noel's suggestion, the often told joke that they'd have to break open a wall to get Josh out was proven wrong. And when the trailer went on tour to various modern museums, domestic and foreign, Josh's signature was beautifully signed in the bottom right hand side of the kitchen floor: the shape of a snow angel made in eggshell white wall paint.