My name is George W. Bush, and I’m having a helluva day. What makes it even worse, is that I only just woke up. And it’s two in the afternoon.

I’ve got a screaming headache, and there’s no mystery as to why. Last night, my wife Laura dumped me – for real this time – on account of my fondness for the bottle. So, I guess just to prove her right, I went out and got royally ripped.

It ain’t the first time that’s happened, and I, for one, would say I have a good reason to want to escape into a drunken stupor once in a while (or more). My life, you see, has not been an easy one, and nowadays it’s getting even harder.

I don’t come from money, I don’t come from power, and my parents don’t have a massive homestead compound in Kennebunkport, Maine, or anywhere else for that matter. I’ve never been able to use my name for anything, at least anything I would want. The name Bush doesn’t open doors, doesn’t get favors, doesn’t save me when I screw up, and won’t get me elected dogcatcher, let alone president.

I wish it did, because there have been lots of times when I could have used the help. Not to mention a few occasions where an expunged criminal record here, or a couple of extra bucks there, would have made a big difference.

I grew up in Texas (for real), just a regular guy trying to make it through this life without any more than my fair share of bumps and bruises. That wasn’t always so easy.

When I was a kid, I got drafted to go to Vietnam. A lot of us thought it was a jive war, being fought by us working-class stiffs, while the rich and the powerful kids from up on the hill got to party-down stateside. I tried to get into the Texas Air National Guard, because I heard that was about as safe a posting as you could get. I even scored well on the entrance exams, but it seemed like that wasn’t really what they were looking at when they made their choices.

So I went to Nam and it was every bit the horror show you rightly thought you could never really imagine. I still wake up in a sweat at night, haunted by my nightmares about that very real nightmare. And I still hobble through every day suffering from injuries my government won’t even admit exist, let alone properly treat. I wish I could have been safe at home those years, partying or working on political campaigns, but I didn’t get dealt those cards.

Things looked a little better for a while after Nam, but then George I. Gula – known to all as “Cal” – got elected governor of Texas running on a big anti-crime scare craze, and as luck would have it my brother Marvin got framed for some ­two-bit murder that was in bad need of a perpetrator. It’s amazing how quickly a situation like that can clear the streets of working-class black men, but Marvin wasn’t fast enough. Next thing you know, some crackers with badges beat a confession out of him, and another cracker in a (black, though it might as well have been white) robe assigned him a public defender who seem to have a lot more skill at drinking and sleeping on the job than he did at representing my brother.

Of course, the appeals court didn’t have much use for Marvin’s claim that a drunk attorney sleeping through the trial is something a might short of justice, and when he later begged for his life, Governor Gula went on TV and mocked him for being a whiny evildoer. So they strapped him in and gave him the juice, and Marvin left this world for another.

What kills me is that they then made this Gula punk president. Heck, he reminds me a lot of myself sometimes (and I’m sure not presidential material), except that he screws up everything he touches, whereas I only screw up some things. The main difference is that he always seems to be getting bailed out and even promoted because of his name and his family’s money, while I’m always getting clobbered because of my lack of money and ordinary family.

It pisses me off what he did to my brother and the way he treats regular folks, so I was anxious to vote against him a few years ago. But when I tried to do so, they wrongly accused me of being a felon and wouldn’t let me go near the booth. It seems some company they hired to purge the rolls of ineligible voters took out a whole lotta folks just like me. By ‘accident’, of course.

My life got pretty bleak in Texas, so after a while I moved to New Orleans, figuring I’d start over there. Then, wham, the flood hit, and my meager little existence was wiped out. Some people say that Katrina was caused by global warming, which the president somehow managed to deny the existence of, even though he gets a lot better scientific advice than I do. All I know is, he came down here afterwards and made a big public show under the klieg lights like he gave a damn, and a year and a half later I’m still living in a thrashed single-wide, and now they’re talking about taking even that away from me.

That alone would be bad enough, but I’m also especially worried now that Gula allowed the assault weapons ban to be lifted. I remember how the neighbors greeted us on the bridge after Katrina hit, and it wasn’t very neighborly. I’d hate to run into those same yahoos again with machine guns in their hands.

But, hey, I’m alive and I’m free, which is more than my other brother, Jeb, can say. He’s been locked away for three years now at Gitmo, getting tortured every day. No one ever told us why, though I think it might have had something to do with some jokes he made on the phone about blowing up the White House. I thought you had to have a warrant to tap people’s phones, but I guess I was wrong. I also thought that in America you got to have a lawyer and a trial and confront witnesses and all that stuff. It says so in the Constitution, but somehow that document doesn’t apply so much under this administration.

That’s pretty bad what they did to my brother, but it gets worse yet. Last spring our mama got sick, and her employer-based medical insurance that Gula called “gold-plated” broke us financially from here to the horizon and back again. We thought maybe the president’s prescription drug plan would help us out, but by the time we got finished filling in the so-called doughnut hole gap, it sure seemed like that law benefitted the drug and insurance companies a lot more than our mom. At least they didn’t take away her Social Security, but I noticed they sure as hell tried. That would have really hurt. Now they want to reduce her Medicare benefits.

That would really hurt, too, except Mama’s dead now. What really gets me is that the doctor said her life probably could have been saved if the president hadn’t turned off stem cell research. He said that they were close to finding a cure for her disease five years ago, when this supposedly pro-life man of religious compassion shut off the funding.

Gula’s tax break never did a heck of a lot for me either, though he sure made a big deal about it and acted like it would. By the time my state and local taxes and college tuition for my daughter went up, that so-called tax cut didn’t even amount to cigarette money. And anyway, as I reckon it, since he borrowed the money from China to pay for all this, it wasn’t a tax cut at all. Jokers like me are going to spend the rest of our lives paying it back, plus interest, while the rich are just getting richer by paying less of their share of taxes. I don’t suppose that whole tax scam matters that much for me at my age, although I do worry about my kids who will be paying for it most of their adult lives.

The good news about my daughter’s tuition is that she flunked out of college and I don’t have to pay it anymore. The guidance counselors say they see a whole lot of students like her, who have been trained under the No Child Left Behind program to take standardized tests, but can’t do much of anything else, including think for themselves. Not that it matters, anyhow. She’s at home now caring for a child she never wanted to have, the product of a sexual assault. You would think a woman could terminate a pregnancy under those conditions, but the right-wing religious people and the state government said no.

As for me, I don’t expect to be around much longer, to tell you the truth. My job got exported to China or somewhere. I heard that the Gula administration actually gave my former company tax breaks to encourage them to give away our jobs. Can you imagine that? I spent a while living off credit cards, but things have become really desperate now. What kind of government allows credit card companies to charge interest rates over 30 percent? Needless to say, my financial house came tumbling down pretty quick, but now they won’t even let you get bankruptcy protection anymore.

So I joined the Reserves in order to put a few bucks in my pocket, and now I’m off to Iraq, a middle-aged man going back to war again. Even if we had proper body armor, which we don’t, I don’t see my chances as being so good, based on what I’ve been hearing from my buddies. I don’t mind fighting for my country, but only for a good reason, and only if everybody’s in the same boat. I don’t get how a guy like Cal Gula can skip out on his war and then lie about another while sending regular folk like me to go fight for his fantasy.

I sure don’t want to die, but I’ve been hearing horror stories about how the VA is scrimping on medical benefits for those who are injured in this war, so even a body bag may be better than coming home wounded and being left to rot away in some privatized, underfunded government hospital.

Y’know, I wish Congress would do something about this president who seems to be making my life worse in every possible way. But from what I hear, he doesn’t seem to care what Congress says or does. He just proclaims these signing statements that allow him to do whatever he wants, regardless. You know, I’m no constitutional scholar, but isn’t that kinda like having a king? And isn’t that what our Revolution was fought against?

All I know is, this guy goes on and on talking about how he cares about people like me, but my life has gone into the toilet ever since he showed up.

And what’s really odd is that there’s not such a big difference between the two of us, when you get down to it. But things have surely turned out a lot different for him and me. Me and my family are down and out, broke and broken, while he’s the president of the United States, trotting around the globe in Air Force One.

Why? As far as I can see, simply because my name is Bush, a name which means nothing, and he is Cal I. Gula, the son of big-shots going back generations.

I don’t think he’d like it very much if he had to live in my world.

I mean, in his world.