..:S...P...I...D...E...R...B...I...T...E...S:..

Sunday, September 09, 2007

“And the roads are covered with a million little molecules of cigarette ashes,
and the school floors are covered with pieces of pencil eraser, too.
Well, pretty soon the grounds gonna be holding onto my ashes, too.
But I can’t hep but wonder if after I’m gone will I still have these...
300 mile per hour, finger breakin’, no answers makin’, battered dirty hands,
bee stung and busted up, empty cup, torrential outpour blues.”
-The White Stripes


FICTION:



spiderbites...a 79% true story



chapter II: thumbstruck





Is tickling really abuse? An old girlfriend used to get mad at me for tickling her all the time. Even though my brother said that me tickling anyone would be less effective than a normal person, she swore just the opposite was true. I would have suspected it wasn’t the tickles that were making her flinch, that maybe it was disgust about my strange hand, if she wouldn’t have been laughing so loud. I would have thought that her laughter alone would prove that I didn’t horrify her, until I remembered that thing about the cats. My little sister had come home crying from the vet after they had to put down two of our kittens, Sputnik 6 and Apollo 9 (the numbers and the rival space programs in the names are a good hint at how many stray animals we had around the house when we were kids), after they’d both gotten clipped by the beloved ice cream truck. She said that Sputnik was purring real loud on the metal table when she was saying goodbye to him, and she told the vet that he didn’t want to have him killed because “look how happy he is!” In a misguided attempt to make my sister feel better, the vet told her that Sputnik wasn’t really happy, that he was in a lot of pain, and that “cats purr for more reasons that you know and it’s usually when they’re scared.” My dad was furious that the vet had said this, and we all listened in horror as he made things worse with some equally misguided fatherly affection by raging into the phone at a helpless secretary:

“Tell you what, why don’t you just throw the cats into fucking wood chippers while the kids watch? Cut out the middle man! Better yet, wait until it’s dead, then act like there was some mix-up and you had the wrong cat! Tell my daughter that Mercury 7 would have lived if she wouldn’t have signed those papers! Wait, that would be cruel. Give her the cat in a box and a mysterious tape and tell her never to listen to it. Huh? Mercury, Sputnik, you know what I mean, bitch.”

Then he slammed the phone down and ruffled our hair, happy to have stuck up for my sister, oblivious to what he’d conjured up to replace my sister’s last image of a purring cat on a metal table. This was typical of our dad. Whenever he felt bad about us getting hurt, physical or otherwise, his anger would be the only thing in the room. We’d forget about our bloody toenail still pinched in the hinge and just wish he’d stop yelling at the door. Hold on, that sounds like he’s nuts, doesn’t it? I meant that he was yelling at the imaginary man in the factory who fucked up the hinge to begin with. The door was just supposed to give him the message. Luckily, my sister was off at college by the time Apollo 39 had his accident. I mean Apollo 49.

The point is, if a cat purrs when it’s scared, maybe someone laughs when they’re upset. Or giggles when they’re actually disgusted by the hand that’s tickling them. The smile might actually be stress-relieving terror. I’ll never know therefore it’s the only memory from three months of dating that girl that I can’t shake loose. After the tickling stopped and she caught her breath, was she mad because of my hand or because tickling really is abuse?

There was this disturbing movie I saw once (or maybe it was a dream) where the moral seemed to be that tickling is a very aggressive thing to do. The other moral in that movie was that killing the main villain, even after the hero casually murders at least fifty of his toadies to get to him, was “just not worth it.” This was, of course, an ‘80s movie (or dream) so it also had the “rape isn’t about sex, it’s about power” nonsense that was so trendy back then. And, of course, that pathetic parental scare tactic that equates tampering with a mailbox to manslaughter. Yes, this movie had it all. So, apparently, when you tickle someone or their kids or your kids or your girl or your cats, in spite of the laughing, they’re really angry, and someone not in reach of your wiggling fingers of joy might sternly explain that what you’re doing is really a form of abuse or “not about giggling, but about power.” However, I think it’s a safe bet that anyone who thinks tickling is abuse has never been punched in the fucking face. And the fact that you can’t tickle yourself, no matter how hard you try, must mean something. You can punch yourself in the face, right? See what I mean? And I am assuming that you can’t tickle yourself because I can’t tickle myself. It might be just me, though, ‘cause one of my hands is a little different.

I got tickled when I was a kid, and it didn't traumatize me, even though it was an older cousin who did it. At least that’s what I think he was doing to me. He held me down with his knees on my hands and jammed his thumbs under my arms until I pissed myself. That’s got to be the Defcon One of tickling. But I wasn’t scarred for life or anything. After that, I just made sure that I tickled someone smaller and weaker than me. Just kidding. Okay, a week after that, I did hold my sister down with my knees on her arms and jam carrots up her nostrils. But they were baby carrots, so I don’t really see a cycle of violence here. And the picture came out blurry, so no one really got hurt. It’s too hard to hold someone down with just your knees, jam shit up their nose, and operate a camera, especially for me.

You know, one last thing about my brother and sister. This always bugged me. When she came home crying from the vet, I tried to make her feel better by telling her that, whatever the cat’s name or number was, it felt no pain. And I thought I was at least doing a better job than my dad or the crazy vet had done. Surprisingly, the one who really calmed her down was my brother with some vague talk about “cat heaven” or some shit. This angered me because, up until that day, my brother’s favorite pastime was torturing my sister by taking a stuffed animal that looked exactly, exactly, like Apollo 11, the skinny little Calico runt of the litter, and come whistling around a corner where my sister was playing with the toy snuggled up against his chest. Then, suddenly and without warning, he’d whip the stuffed animal against the wall, or throw it out a nearby window, or punt it into the ceiling fan. My sister fell for this at least twice, and she’d shriek and retrieve the mangy stuffed animal, then later pout under the deck cuddling both Apollo 11 and the impostor against her neck. And after all that brotherly fun, he got to be the hero when she needed a brotherly shoulder? Bullshit.

* * *

Anyway, tickling did not scar anyone for life. What childhood scars did I pick up? Insert trippy flashback noise. Let's start in the garage. A boy’s father’s garage usually begins innocently as refuge from a hot summer day with its promise of shade and that cool, concrete floor, but actually it’s a horrifying obstacle course of cuts and contusions. Thinking back, though, the only real injury that I can remember ever happening in my dad's garage wasn’t even inside around all the sharp teeth of his power tools. It was at the door, half in, half out, which might suggest that a garage is the most dangerous place on the planet if just the door can fuck you up this bad.

My brother and I were being chased home from the “mudpit” (a shallow, milky, borderline-stagnant pond where we went fishing for Bluegill every day before, after, and sometimes during school) and these older kids in a jacked-up 4x4 were tearing after us on our bicycles after someone made some smartass comment to them (hint: it wasn’t my brother) when they slowed down to see if we’d caught anything. We’d caught 17 fish too small to eat and left them in a bucket to die when the chase ensued. I felt bad about that when I went back two days later.

So we were flying down the road with that truck weaving and honking behind us. I pedaled faster since I had a shitty bike with no seat to rest my ass on, so I got back to our house first. I turned to see my brother taking the last turn so fast his knees were up high against his handlebars and his pedals were a whirling blur nowhere near his feet. I dismounted like a drunk gymnast and let my bike hit the wall and leave a black streak of rubber near the furnace. Then, In a panic, I started pulling down the garage door as fast as I could. Right then my brother came flying down the driveway at Mach 3, feet trying to get back on his pedals to stop himself and BANG! The garage door caught him in the top of the head and scraped him right off those pedals as quick and efficient as a boot decapitating a dandelion. His bike, now pilotless, flew in without him and found me, and the fender caught me hard in the shin. My brother was down, I was down, and his bike was now on my chest like a happy dog at the door, its front wheel still spinning in my face. My brother was splayed out Christlike in the gravel, and the 4x4 rumbled up to the edge of our driveway, a teenage head peeked out to mutter, “Oh, shit, he’s dead,” and then the truck was gone with a roar. My brother woke up before the wheels of his bike stopped spinning in my face, and he ran past me into the house screaming his head off. If I got in trouble for that, I don’t remember. The gash in my shin should have received a stitch or two, but everyone was too worried about my brother’s possible concussion. There’s probably still a scar on my leg, but the thing I think about most from that day is the smell of that bicycle tire an inch from my nose and the little nipples of rubber sticking out of the tread that I’d never noticed before.

How else did I accidentally injure my older, more athletic brother? He got hurt a lot more than me. At least it seemed like it with all the attention. Well, let’s see, I chipped his same front tooth twice. And the first incident involved, tragically, a pink football and a toy called a “Sketch-A-Pet.” Remember those? Two dials, full of sand, little invisible needle that drew on the inside of the glass screen like a creature stuck inside a tiny television? It was a poor-man’s version of a very popular toy. Only this one included the outlines of all sort of animals you could trace that included, bizarrely, beasts you’d never keep as a “pet.” Like a rhinoceros. Also, in case anyone ever wondered, there are all sorts of things waiting to be discovered when you crack one open with a hammer. Like that it stops working.

He was laying on the bed playing with it over his head, and I innocently, casually threw my sister’s tiny foam football at him. As hard as I could. The Sketch-A-Pet dropped from his hands and bashed him full in the mouth. After a couple seconds of silent bleeding, he tore screaming down the stairs. I know I got in trouble for that, especially when I used the toy to scrawl “Aaaaaargh!” on the screen and then tried to convince him that this was the last thing he wrote before impact. Then, days after he finally got his tooth fixed (all us kids were jealous of his fang-like incisor shard for weeks) and we were skating on the neighbor’s frozen yard, my brother wiped out trying to skate backwards and broke that same tooth. Actually, now that I think about it, I don't think I had anything to do with his broken tooth that second time. That day, I was too busy at the other end of the neighbor’s frozen field, on my hands and knees with one skate in my hand. I was oblivious to my wet sock growing heavier and heavier, picking up snow and mud like a magnet, because I could see a fish just under the ice and I wanted to chip my way down to it with that skate. For some reason, I thought that setting it free into the winter air would save it. Or maybe I was going to rush it home to the toilet. Either way, I’m guessing that if a frozen fish can think, this one was praying that my rescue attempts wouldn’t be successful.

I did hack it free, at the cost of a third of the fish’s tail and a series of deep gashes across the top of my own wrist. When I got home to show my mom, she shoved me out of the way, a long phone cord wrapped around her three times as she screamed into the receiver at my father, telling him what I’d done to my brother again. I turned to see him sitting at the kitchen table with his hockey stick over one shoulder like a soldier, mouth all red again. I ran my wrist under the faucet and thought about that fish instead. How the hell does a fish end up in someone’s backyard? I wished my mom would get off the fact that my brother keep cracking the same tooth in half and spend a second thinking about how strange this fish thing was. A fish in your yard? That’s like finding a fish in your toilet. No, actually that’s fairly common. It’s more like finding a fish in the tank behind your toilet. And why were the yards in our neighborhood in a constant state of flooding? You’d have thought we lived in Vietnam instead of a Northwest Ohio suburb. Also, how could a fish in a backyard grow to that size? The field had only been frozen for a week. I wondered if any puddle sat long enough, would something eventually be swimming around in it, even if it was on a rooftop?

Me and my brother went the rest of that summer without incident. Then, one fall afternoon, I was coloring a line of cars I’d just drawn in my new giant sketchbook, trying to fill each one in with every crayon, debating, as always, whether to even bother with the white crayon at all. Of course, I colored it white on white anyway, even though it looked stupid, because I’d worry that my car drawing was never finished if I didn’t do it. The “flesh” colored crayon bothered me that day, too, because I imagined a flesh-colored automobile would be horrifying and probably make me throw up in my mouth a little. Suddenly, right then, I cracked my last perfect crayon in half when I heard my brother scream. I ran outside and caught a glimpse of my mom taking him around the house, heard the sound of a zipper, and then heard her say, “You’re fine. Just leave it alone.” That injury will always remain a mystery, but I think my broken, flesh-colored crayon hanging limp inside its wrapper might be a clue.

What else happened to my brother? Even though I had more wounds, he had more broken bones, and he got all that attention because his injuries were usually sports-related. Or at least perceived as sports-related. Like that first time he chipped his tooth? He’d tell people with a straight face that it was while he was playing football, leaving out the part that the football was pink and small enough to usually be found in my sister’s teddy bear’s arms. And another time when he got hurt playing with toys, he told people he was “working out.” To this day, no one is sure how he sliced his hand wide open on our dad’s weight bench, ending up with a middle finger hanging off and dangling by a sliver of bone and some tendons. My aunt was baby-sitting us at the time, and I heard him scream from the garage (I was getting used to random screams by then) and suddenly she was violently yanking me off the toilet to take him to the hospital. I could see him curled up and whimpering in the front seat on the way there, and I could see that his finger was almost severed. But getting yanked off a toilet when you’re 10 years old? Tossed in the back of a car before you can wipe your ass or pull up your pants? Now, that was traumatizing.

And afterwards, when he walked around sporting a brilliant white-wrapped hand, he told everyone he slipped while exercising, even though he knew we both used to race toy cars along the seat of my dad’s exercise bench all the time. Hell, one of us even drew a race track on it, a winding course through the tufts of cushion that poked out of the split vinyl. Of course, I wasn’t there when it happened, as the jury can see from the red marks on my knees from reading at least half a comic book on the toilet during that crisis. However, I’d submit as evidence that if you pushed a toy tractor hard enough, especially the ones that reward you with a rumbling sound when you grind their wheels into the ground, a young sweaty hand slipping off the toy would pitch a child’s body forward, and the sharp metal joint where the legs of the bench were screwed together would be the first place you’d reach for to break your fall. And I’ll bet there’s blood on that weight bench’s joint right now, hidden in the corner of my dad’s attic. I should go get it.

My brother broke his arm the following summer, right about the time people stopped asking about his finger. Or was it his elbow? He was playing tennis, a sport that he didn’t even like, but was, of course, good at anyway. He had a big cast for that one, one of those casts that went the length of his arm because they had to isolate his elbow from moving. That giant cast was covered in a colorful spiderweb of signatures and knock-knock jokes and love notes and profanity and inexcusably talentless drawings of tennis rackets. I tried to draw him a perfect car near his wrist, but he got impatient with all the different markers and rulers I was using and how long it was taking me, so he shoved me down and walked away. It’s probably for the best, as my drawing of the car was actually going to be a crime scene-sketch to prove he wasn’t really working out when he got hurt on that weight bench a year earlier.

And I had a tennis injury, too. Since he was playing tennis, and I was only a year younger, it was real easy to make me play tennis at the same time, in spite of my lack of interest or skill. I was sent to a weekend tennis camp and spent the first day in the corner ignoring the coaches, having a contest with the only child less skilled than me, a frowning girl in a constant state of shrugging her shoulders that I developed a quick, devastating crush on. We were seeing who could bounce the ball the most times on the racket, explaining to any disgusted looks that it was just like those paddles with the red rubber balls, “but only we can see the string.” She never said a word about my strange hand either. Then the second (and last) day of tennis camp arrived, and I was so excited to see her that I jumped out of the car and wiped out in some stones and scraped the skin off both my palms. My dad tossed me right back into the back seat and took me to the emergency room. I never saw her again, and I could give a fuck about tennis or those paddles with those red rubber balls to this day, although seeing one might give me a traumatic flashback and make me trip or piss myself. But whenever I see two kids playing tennis (smaller than me, of course) I’m tempted to steal their balls and run simply because I can’t bear to think about how stupid I looked slipping in the stones that Sunday.

So that season, I had two hands wrapped in gauze, and my brother had a thick cast down his arm. No one signed my gauze even though I gave a long, detailed demonstration at the lunch table showing how it was actually not that hard to do, if you had enough people to stretch the gauze tight, and you wrote with a light touch, maybe having an idea in your head of exactly what to write already (I had a handful of short but profound suggestions) and you wrote real fast with just the right pen. Everyone just chewed their square, rubber pizzas at me in silence.

* * *

We both broke our noses, a couple of times each. My worst nose-breaking was much more dramatic than his, but it received about one-eighth of the attention. His nose got squashed when he slipped during a basketball game and left a bright-red starfish right on the foul line. But my nose was knocked around my head like a cartoon duck after a shotgun blast when I got the ever living-shit beat out of me over some stupid girl back in 10th grade. That was the first and last time I ever got my ass kicked. We had a student-exchange thing with other local schools, and I signed up for every one so I could be king for a day where no one knew me. It was great to reinvent myself every time (something I’d later perfect every semester at college). It was always one guy and one girl from each school that got to go, so my only obstacle to transforming into a brooding mystery kid each visit was, of course, the fucking girl that came with me from my school. Sometimes I’d see her talking to these strange kids, whispering in ears, blowing my cover, and I was convinced she was answering their questions and telling them about every idiotic thing I’d ever done in my own cafeterias and hallways. On the car ride, staring at the back of her head (whatever student council member was taking her turn) that was the only time I seriously considered some sort of accident/cover-up so that I could walk into a new school alone. However, my worst student exchange, the one that resulted in one broken nose, a cracked sinus cavity, and a busted wrist was completely my own fault. So convinced of my new tough-guy identity at the last of these school-for-a-day programs (a visit to a nearby countrified high school with the hilarious name Brickwood) and certain I was invulnerable to any stranger that wasn’t around to see my awkward childhood, I promptly talked a truckload of shit to the toughest guy’s girlfriend. I told him I’d meet him after school on Friday, after the game (whatever game it was, there was always a game on Friday). I had met her in a math class where they were talking a test, and the teacher didn’t know what to do with me, so he threw me a sports magazine. I pretended to read it, pretending I liked sports, then started whispering to this girl in front of me to kill the 99% of class time remaining. When the bell finally rang, one of her friends came up to me and said I reminded her of someone. When I asked who, she shrugged and turned me around by the shoulders to face that girl from the math class and giggled, “Go for it,” then said I was just her friend’s type, then added, “Too bad she’s got a boyfriend.” I said cheerfully, “Fuck him! There’s a new sheriff in town!” And word quickly spread. It spread around my school, too. And when the weekend approached, all the guys from my high school wanted to go with me, thinking of it as a goofy teen movie, school-on-school rumble. I told them the wrong place so that I could go there myself, because I was thinking of it as a completely different goofy teen movie. I was thinking of it as the movie where all I had to do is kick the biggest guy’s ass and, uh, the gang would be mine, right? Luckily, my brother caught wind of where the fight was really going to be and secretly followed along or I’d probably still be curled up in a pile of fists and shoes ten years later.

Friday night came, and I was pacing around the rubble of the construction site trying to work up some kind of righteous anger. But all I kept thinking about was how my dad once told me, “If you punch someone in the face, aim for a space behind their head ‘cause you might get there.” That made me smile, and I was even laughing when all the cars and the vans (!) pulled up and kids started to swarm out the sliding doors. I said, “Who’s first! Take a number, fucknuts!” So doomed.

I did crack the big guy with one good shot, and then I tried to pull his shirt over his head like I first did in a hockey (video) game. All this second move did was cause someone to yell out confused, “What the fuck does he want your shirt for?” Then my third move was a punch that connected with a leaning concrete slab where the parking lot was under construction. That’s when my arm snapped at the wrist and stopped working, and that’s when I went down. Later, my brother’s girlfriend, who was in the car with him parked just around the corner out of sight, told me why my brother gets the MVP award that night and not me. She said that right before he jumped out of the car to run and help my sorry ass, he reached into his glove box and put in his football mouthpiece. At home, he was always boiling these mouthpieces and walking around or watching TV with these things stretching out his lips so that they’d shape perfectly to his teeth. As our school’s varsity quarterback, he thought it was important that there was always a couple prototypes within his reach at all times. Just in case an important football game broke out during breakfast, a traffic jam, church, whatever. So he popped a mouthpiece in, kissed the girl (who ended up marrying him, of course) and said heroically around a slobbering, muffled mouthful of rubber, “Mlph meph mrph maph, maybe.” Translation: “I’ll be right back, baby.” Or maybe he said “maybe” instead of “baby.” Her record of events has always been suspect.

Then he jumped onto the dogpile of flailing fists and feet to pull me out and promptly got his ass kicked, too.

At some point I ended up under my car. But that wasn’t even the worst part. Compared to the rest of the story, crawling around punch-drunk under my muffler watching everyone’s shoes all sideways and bleary-eyed would have made that night’s highlight reel. And I had to drive home with a stick shift left-handed ‘cause my right wrist was broken. You ever try to drive stick shift left-handed? It’s like trying to make spaghetti with your feet. By that I mean, it’s actually not impossible. Anyway, that wasn’t the worst part. When we got home, my dad was so mad that we’d been hurt that he almost knocked down the refrigerator getting out ice cubes. But that wasn’t the worst part either. And the girl I’d been whispering to in that math class had been there the whole time? Saw everything. But that wasn’t the worst part neither. The worst part of the story was the epilogue, where math girl and her friends decided to come by my house weeks after I had surgery on my sinuses and skull, just to see how I was. All nasally and hoarse, I tried to instruct my dad not to let them into our house. After he’d shrugged and sent them away a third time, he finally laughed and said to me, “Boy, you know you lost a fight when you make the girlfriends of the guys who beat your ass start crying. The only thing worse is...no. I can’t think of anything worse!”

Because of his rescue attempt, my brother had to have his ribs taped up for the upcoming football game, and he heroically showed off his T-shirt from that night that sported a huge footprint in the middle of the back. And he didn’t wash it off, wearing it way past its expiration date. I tried to get people to sign the cast on my broken wrist, even though they wanted to sign the tape on my face, thinking I’d be a legend after sending everyone to the wrong place (Buckaroo Drive-In, five miles away from the fight, far enough that they wouldn’t hear the theme music I was sure would be playing) and then going off to boldly fight those guys alone. Instead, people covered my cast with advice like, “Duck, dumbass,” and “Need a map, stupid?” and scores like, “Brickwood: Won” and “Me: Zero.” But I’ll admit it, I was sort of happy to finally have a graffiti-covered injury of my own. At least when I was far enough away so no one could actually read it. And maybe I drew some shit on there, too. Even though that’s the equivalent of sending flowers to myself under a fake name.

Years later, I had a job for a whole day in a fertilizer plant, and some dude around my age came up to me in the cafeteria and asked me my name, all suspicious and threatening. I stared down at my tray and thought to myself, “You mean I can’t graduate, get a beefy blue-collar job a city away and still not worry about confrontations in a lunch room?” But it turned out he thought I was another guy. The same guy who had kicked my own ass all those years ago. Apparently, I looked just like him. At least according to this twitchy bastard at the fertilizer plant. We actually became friends, and one day he laughed and told me how the same van-load of assholes I crossed paths with had ripped down his screen door and walked into his own home to smack him around with pool cues until he shit himself. I guess I got off easy. He was wrong about one thing, though. That kid didn’t look like me at all. This ain’t some weak-ass “I was really fighting myself” revelation in the story, so don’t even think it. But he did look just like my brother.

After that fight, I quickly learned the art of the cheap shot. Yeah, after I healed, I had countless revenge schemes I never acted on, camping outside that suburban “gang” leader’s house many nights but never doing shit. I’d just glance up at myself in the rearview mirror after every song on the radio ended, noticing how crooked my nose was now. Or I’d squint one eye, and, from three houses away, I’d trace the outline of his last name that was painted on the backboard of the basketball hoop in his driveway. One time, I punched that radio when I thought I heard someone dedicating a song to him. I even kept a copy of his wedding announcement, which my sister initially found, squinted at the paper and asking me all confused, “Is that you?” Nope! That’s why I lost.

My brother’s girlfriend was so disgusted when she heard about all those girls from the other school trying to come see me. She told me she remembered seeing the math girl hugging her boyfriend, my nemesis, right after the fight because he looked so cool all shirtless with his bloody nose. I guess I was harder to hug, under my car nursing an a swollen head with an arm all crooked and bulging as if a drunk clown had tried to twist it into a balloon animal.

“’Math girl,’ huh?” my future sister-in-law snickered. “You should have asked her if you were outnumbered.”

* * *

Let’s see. How else did I get hurt...
Here’s one that’s sports-related and probably the only one that was actually during a game. I broke a finger by punching a guy in the helmet during the last seconds of the fourth quarter, a part of the game I referred to as the “kickoff” since it was the only time I was allowed on the field. That wasn't very smart, but that punk had stepped on my hand when I was crawling on the ground trying to get involved in a tackle after the fact that was nowhere near me. I took my helmet off and demanded that he do the same. He laughed and said, “No way!” while his braces smiled out from under his perfectly formed mouthpiece and faceguard. So I punched him anyway and cracked the top knuckle on my ring finger on his chin-strap snap. But I don’t blame that kid for the bulbous, peanut-looking digit I’m still sporting because that injury was just the result of my frustration of being stuck on the JV squad while, of course, my brother was quarterback. But that's fine, too, because while he was having so much fun fucking cheerleaders and going home early on game days, he doesn't remember any of this like I do, or else he remembers it all wrong. So my reward is getting to write it all down.

What else? Junior year, I wrapped my car around a telephone pole and put my left hand a good foot into the dashboard, right through the plastic grille covering the vent. I milked that injury for all it was worth. It happened on the way to school, and I left my smashed car (a little red, two-seater Furio, called a “poor-man’s hot rod” by a snarky classmate and which, on impact, reveals that it's probably fashioned out of popsicle sticks) and I shuffled dazed and zombie-like to this farmhouse across a cornfield. All the buses, even the short ones, filed by my smoking car on their way in since it was a very small town and the site of my wreck was the last major road to our high school. Later I heard that after homeroom, kids were talking about it in the halls, and by the first lunch period, I was officially dead. My girlfriend at the time had to leave her science class crying (wish it had been math class) when she heard the news. Can you imagine the attention I got from her after that? I’ve never been so happy about someone else's misery in my life. I even went to school that day after I got out of the hospital, just in time for the second lunch period in order to bask in that glory. She was all sniffling at my locker when I came in, and I had my hand barely wrapped up and, like, two stitches at the most (that I had drawn on my hand actually) but I was acting like I just got back from storming the beach at Normandy. I reenacted the crash with straws and tatertots and bursting ketchup packets, and if she’d have paid attention in science class, or at least stayed until the end, she would have realized that the physics of my lunch table replay were suspect. I walked around with my bandages, pointing at things for no reason, pretending like people were looking at my left hand and not staring at the birth defect on my right, like they usually did. Still, I enjoyed the attention...until these other two other kids actually got hit by a goddamn train three days later. One of them broke his leg when the train dragged their car about a mile down the tracks, and when he came back to school on his crutches (he was only out for a day?!) with a fucking piece of his car still stuck in his elbow, and no one gave a shit about my hand anymore.

Here's a good one. I was sitting on the edge of one of those aboveground pools once when I was 6 or 7, and I fell backwards and my palm slapped this row of exposed screws where it wasn't quite finished being put together, and they punched three big holes in my hand right down to the bones. They had trouble with the stitches on that one because they were puncture wounds and not cuts. I remember staring at the holes waiting for them to bleed so it would be okay to start crying.

Oh, here's a real good one where I look like a genius! I had this golf ball, and I was standing on our porch with a neighbor girl and whipping it at the ground over and over to see how many times I could get it to rebound off the roof and floor of the porch (you can see where this is going) and I threw it as hard as I could and Smack! Smack! Twice right in the fucking mouth. Then I fell down and broke my pinkie. Slow-motion replay shows the golf ball hit the roof, hit my mouth, hit the ground, hit me in the mouth again, putting my top two teeth through my bottom lip, then me dropping to the ground very confused. And it took forever for my mouth to heal. I was proudly displaying this huge, greasy sausage lip with two oozing white holes in it. It looked like I got bit trying to kiss a snake. And the pinkie healed all crooked too because I got it caught it in a freezer before it had a chance to heal. I was freezing flies in an ice cube tray, trying to see if I could bring them back to life when they thawed. True story. That was all last Thursday. Just kidding. I think I was 9.

One time, I was running with a stick over these big, broken slabs of highway, and I tripped and jammed the stick through the center of my hand. Luckily it went through that fan of skinny bones and didn’t pop out the top, but it left another round puncture wound that took forever to close up.

Once, I sprained both wrists and ruptured a disc in my back by moving boxes of books at work. Ended up having surgery on my spine and spent a month of rehab in a pool with weights around my ankles. The crazy woman in charge of my rehabilitation seemed to develop a crush on me, and I started getting worried that she didn't want to see me get better and kept trying to injure me again so I’d keep coming back. Seriously, who the fuck puts weight on your ankles in a pool? How dangerous is that? I was waiting for her to tie my hands behind my back and blindfold me, too. But now that I think about it, I’m sure she just focused on me because all the other guys there with work-related injuries never did anything but wander around like the undead and any exercises they did were always lazy and slow and in line with the TV high above their heads. All the construction workers wanted to know what happened to my right hand instead of my wrists and back. I changed the subject, telling them they should try the weights in the pool ‘cause “it’s just like running on the moon!” They backed away slowly.

Once, I ruptured my urethra trying to piss into a former friend’s mailbox. It was too high, so I was straddling it instead, twisting and bending my shit down and back to get inside. I guess I bent shit too far. And I guess the idea of pissing in the mailbox got both me and my shit a little too excited. It’s hard enough trying to piss through half an erection in the morning, now add a little red flag to the equation. It might be true that you can’t tickle yourself, but if you’re sitting on a mailbox with your pants down, a little red flag can tickle your balls when you least expect it. Sure, maybe that day could be considered a “mistake.” But not the prank. That was a good idea. Seriously, try it. Just make sure the mailbox is low enough. Custom wooden ones shaped like animals are best, ones where someone thought it was cute if the mailman had to stick his arm in a shark’s mouth every morning. Feed it something else instead. “Federal offense,” my ass.

Once, I sliced the webbing between almost every finger repeatedly trying to cut open a baseball to see what was inside. As a pitcher for our baseball team, I couldn’t believe my brother never needed to know this secret. “Always cut away from you,” my uncle said when he found me running my hand under the faucet. Then he added, laughing, “when you’re cutting open baseballs?!” Clearly, a hand under the faucet was obviously the only first-aid remedy I knew. I think I learned it from watching my mom prepare vegetables.

Once, I was running to the bathroom to get two fishhooks out of my arm, when I saw my sniffling brother creep in there first with my dad right behind him. That was the first time I ever saw two people go into a bathroom at once. Whatever the hell he kept doing to himself that required secrecy, I’ll never know. I took the hooks out in the garage. You know, two people going into the bathroom at once probably freaked me out more than whatever new pubescent horror my brother kept discovering about his body. Those moments of bathroom terror only happen to the first-born, I think. With a sibling always ahead of me, I saw everything weird that grew on his body first, so I never had to panic.

Once, I fell about a hundred feet out of this tree at our family’s first house. It was this huge weeping willow with a broken branch at the top that laid flat across two splits in the trunk. After a week of debate, we named it "The Bridge," and we would climb up there and stand and look out at everyone's rooftops. And, of course, it finally collapsed when I was on it, dropping me down through about 50 limbs like someone had just hit the multi-ball reward on a pinball machine. I ended up tangled and hanging upside down over a thick bottom branch, slowly rocking back and forth, trying to cry with the wind knocked out of me. Then I untangled, dropped to the grass, and saw a layer of skin sheered off my left forearm, wrist, and fingertips. I couldn’t touch anything for weeks, it stung so bad.

Speaking of pinball machines! One year our dad actually got us one for Christmas. It was a weird one, though. You know how pinball machines usually have themes, like movies or musicians? Well, this one’s theme seemed to be “pinball,” as it had pictures of ‘70s-looking guys playing pinball on it. Therefore, I can only assume that the machines they were playing also had little dudes playing pinball on them. But me and my brother loved it, and we must have played with it for a whole six to nine minutes. Then we tried to take it apart. I was reaching up inside to try to get the metal balls out (I had to get them out) and my brother hit the buttons, and something inside blinked, squawked, gave me 500 points, and quickly sliced the top off one of my knuckles. I still have this white line across the bone to this day. Never got the balls out of it either. I used to lie and tell people that white line on my knuckle was from someone's tooth during a fight. And I still have a picture of that pinball machine in my wallet, too. Ask anyone. And a picture of a cat from three cats ago. And a lizard from five lizards ago. And my nephew. You know why? Because every one of them bit me. None as hard as that pinball machine, though.

You know, it seems like every injury I’ve remembered so far was a hand injury. And even the ones that weren’t exclusively hand-related definitely had a hand involved as an equally guilty accomplice. What about the rest of my body? Well, if you drew one of those crime scene chalk outlines around me, starting at the bottom...

I cut my toe open like a hastily peeled banana when I tried to stop a ceiling fan with a headstand. Took a nail three inches into my heel when I made the mistake of wearing tennis shoes to my first day of work at a construction site. Stabbed myself in the ankle with a pencil while trying to map the blood flow of the veins in my feet to scientifically prove to my dad I needed a better bicycle. Picked a nickel-sized hole into my knee by never letting a mystery bug bite heal. Scorched the hair off my legs while running through a campfire on a “dare” in order to avoid having to choose the “truth.” Chipped my tailbone repeatedly missing the same ski lift. Rubbed my ass until it bled since the hiking trip was in October and the brown leaves camouflaged how I’d normally know when to stop wiping. Accidentally shaved off a nipple while wiring myself with a tape recorder to prove a friend was lying. Dislocated a shoulder arm-wrestling one time too many times with the toddlers I was baby-sitting. Tore a bicep trying unsuccessfully to keep a wheelbarrow full of cinderblocks from tipping over. Filled the skin around my elbow with gravel on my first, and last, homemade skateboard. Stabbed my wrist cutting a bagel. Stabbed my ring finger when I tried to punish the bagel for hurting me like that. Jammed my middle finger on the game-winning pass (thrown by my brother) during the most important game of neighborhood football of our childhood. Purposefully cut the hell out of my hand with my thumbnail trying to sabotage a palm reading. Took a deep puncture wound from a branch a half-centimeter from my aorta while running through the woods at night looking for somewhere to piss. Dislocated my jaw when I asked a friend to help stage a fight on a hay ride to impress someone’s dad. Received third-degree sunburn on my forehead when I fell asleep drunk hiding on a roof during a pool party. Stood up a half-dozen times in a crawlspace and cut open the same spot on my scalp on the same metal beam every fucking time. Split my lip trying to play a guitar with my mouth right when I got to the solo. Bit the inside of my cheek over and over until it bled but still wouldn’t spit out the gum that was causing this. Threw up so hard I tore my esophagus after eating an evening full of prototypes of the world’s largest waffle. Bit a small piece off my tongue while telling a joke coming out of a Holocaust museum exhibit and suddenly stepping down a few inches lower than I anticipated. Put a heart-shaped rock up a nostril to hide it from kids on the playground and started a three-hour nosebleed when I laughed and blew it out later that night. Cored out the inside of my ear with the head of an action figure trying to dig for a creature that wasn’t there. Scratched a cornea on a flying seashell shard while breaking open a Cherokee rain stick to see what was making those freaky rain noises. Took a rock in the other eye the very next day while challenging my brother to try to hit me from the other end of a stack of sewer pipes. And (a real head-scratcher) woke up with a blood-soaked pillow for unknown reasons.

I’d get into all the times I was sick (and that list is substantial, too) except that it’s been my experience that young boys are expected to be injured, not ill. Sniffling, sneezing, and bellyaches were symptoms exclusively for the girls. However, notice that none of those were sports-related. Even when I jammed my finger during that game, I was spitefully trying not to catch that football, I swear. Hey, did you know that children get enraged by a physical defect in their presence about as much as adults get enraged by someone’s inability to drive efficiently? Imagine your reaction to someone just parked there when the light turns green. That hatred you can barely contain? The temperature you have to adjust in the car afterwards? That’s what happens all around you when you’re a kid on the playground and, for some reason, just because of the way your hand was born, you just can’t catch the ball.

* * *

Now that we’re grown and all those injuries are said and done, if you had me and my brother stand next to each other, you’d think we’d be these hunched over, scar-covered monsters. But we’re not. We healed fast, like all young boys do. However, if you did a cartoon outline of our two bodies, mine would be the only one that was missing something. Imagine two outlines of our bodies, like the longest, most detailed game of hangman ever played. It would seem to be a tie...until you looked real close and saw that I had actually lost the game. Because there would only be four tiny lines at the end of one of my arms. And both his would have five.

See, speaking of things that bite (wasn’t I?) and things that are missing, I forgot all about my thumb. You’d think I’d dwell on something like that, but you know what? About three minutes out of every day I don’t even think about it. Even though I told that cop in that strange dragonfly storm that I was born this way, technically I still consider it an injury.

I am missing the thumb on my right hand. There was a spider in the womb with me.

I look like everyone else except for that thumb. And remember, when I talk about the thumb, I’m really not talking about a thumb. I’m really talking about the space where the thumb should be. And if it wasn’t for that thumb, no one would know that there was anything different at all. No one would know that there was anything wrong. I was told by a doctor that the reason I’m missing my thumb is because my mother had “webs in her womb.” This is the kind of simple explanation that can make a child dangerously overanalyze things. Was there a spider in there with me? Did I spin the webs? Is the inside of my mother like the horror movie where the monster’s mouth opens up and there’s strings of spit dangling down from the roof of its mouth and those strings hardened and got sharp as piano wire or guitar strings or fishing line?

When I was little, I told people that my thumb was removed by scientists to stop me from accidentally crushing things in my hand. I said that after the 50th baby bottle exploded in my grip, the government had to take drastic action. I said I could have been the greatest guitarist, quick-draw artist, masturbator, Major League pitcher, thumb wrestler in history. In reality, the only thing I ever accidentally crushed was a pumpkin that I had been too lazy to carve and I had set on the TV with an impossibly intricate face mapped out in black marker. I guess the face was enough, and I let it sit until Easter. Then another Easter. And when I went to move it, my existing thumb punched through the pumpkin with sickening ease and I had to stifle a gag. Later a girlfriend told me that her back injury (that’s how we met, comparing spinal injuries) made her worry that my finger would hit the wrong spot over her scar and puncture her back, just like my pumpkin story. She wouldn’t allow back rubs from me in spite of me saying, “We’re made for each other, damn it! Look, ma, no thumb!” Tickling was, of course, off limits.

My mom called my thumbless hand my “bad” hand before I knew what she was talking about. When I say “bad,” I mean something would be happening like, say, my mom tickling me, and she would stop suddenly when I gripped her arm with my “bad” hand. Another time, she flinched when she saw me breaking green beans in the sink, and she made me wash my hands three times. What did she do? Well, I can’t prove it, but my brother said that when I was born, instead of holding me up and spanking me to get me breathing, she screamed and hit me with a fly swatter.

Sometimes I could hide the (lack of) thumb for years before someone actually noticed. At jobs, I would lie and tell guys I lost it in a factory accident while on an assembly line making cars. I tell them that they never found the thumb, that it’s still somewhere in someone’s car. Then, after about 10 beers, I’d say I was lying about the factory accident. And when they asked where the thumb was, I’d act depressed and say, “In my stomach.” Then, after about 20 beers, I’d finally mutter the truth. And they’d be like, “Spiders? Why wouldn’t you brag about that instead?”

They were right. Even though a birth defect is thought of as a weakness (or worse, a sickness) to your peers, the results, especially later in life, usually look more like a wound. And there’s definitely something comforting to a boy who can turn his illness into injury by just adding a spider to the recipe.

Then there was that pencil through my heart. True story. How could I forget that, you ask? I wasn’t saving it for last, I swear. There something worse right after this story.

Here’s how it happened. I liked to draw pictures on my hands of what I dreamed the night before (later I just started writing them down on paper), so I always kept a pencil in my bed. Some people think you need ink to write on (or under) your skin. Not true. Unless you just ate a greasy ham sandwich, a pencil will write on your body just fine. And any inmate will tell you that pencil lead tattoos a man as easily as a ball-point pen. Anyhow, with a pencil stashed in my bed, sometimes I’d lose it under the mountain of covers and sheets, so I’d give up looking and carefully sharpen a new one and toss it under my pillow. Then I’d lose another one and sharpen another one and toss it under. This went on awhile. And the pencil’s had to be sharp. I liked the red lines that were left on my skin when my last dream was scrubbed off in the shower. Sometimes it was words, sometimes drawings. Sometimes doodles. The red scratches of a monster outlined in the palm of my hand would help me smile when I was watching the clock in study hall. So eventually there were at least ten pencils hidden in my bed, all their tips sharpened to infinity. And one Sunday afternoon, I suddenly remembered vividly what I’d dreamed that morning, having forgot it the instant I tried to tell someone, and I ran upstairs and dove into my bed headfirst for no good reason to draw the story on my hand.

The pencil that was waiting for me slipped easily through my T-shirt and even easier into my chest. It punctured fabric, sunburn, flesh, fat, muscle, blood, and then my heart. It went deep, was almost painless, and there was very little bleeding. I think that was because I’d sharpened those pencils so damn long. I even tried to hurry up and draw my dream onto my hand with another pencil from my bed, worried I’d forgot it again. But I had to stop to go find my mom, since the arrow in my chest felt like it was growing larger and heavier with each breath. I approached her at the sink as casually as I would with a splinter in my finger. And when she saw the pencil pulsing up and down with each beat of my heart, she knew not to pull it out, and her eyes suddenly told me how serious it was. She hustled me into the car as quick and efficient as my aunt ever did and drove to the hospital slightly slower than the speed of sound. I could tell she was trying hard not to panic, every so often turning to glance down at the pink eraser poking from my shirt, bobbing in time with my surprisingly slow and even pulse. And her calm was infectious. She was strangely relaxed, therefore, so was I. And even when I relate these incidents to strangers, this story is just as relaxed, not a rapid heartbeat in the room, although that might just be my lack of storytelling skills. Still, she was so effective that day that I still resist any urge to add any sense of urgency to the fastest 25-mile hospital ride in history. It was like we were driving (more like flying) anywhere; school, post office, library, grocery store. The atmosphere in the car was so weirdly calm that I almost reached for the stereo. When we walked into the emergency room, it was the professionals that finally ratcheted up my hysteria. And the last thing I remembered was the bouncing tip of that pink eraser speeding up, wiggling faster and faster like a tiny diving board that a swimmer’s toes had just left behind.

When I woke up, the pencil was out, and I was being told I was the luckiest kid in Ohio, and I cried when I looked under my shirt and saw that the scar they’d made was a lot worse than the one I’d made. Turns out I was stabbed through the “sinus” of my heart. Imagine the confusion that word caused (“my heart has a nose?!”). And the tip of the pencil had also penetrated a “semi-lunar valve.” Image the confusion that word caused (“I was born on the moon?!”).

Before I checked out, I hit the big red button to summon the nurse that said I was the luckiest kid in Ohio, and I asked her, “Why did you say ‘in Ohio?’ Is this something that happens in every state? Don’t seem likely.” She rolled her eyes and walked off. Too bad, because I wanted to talk to her more. I’m pretty sure she was the one that was washing me when I was unconscious, so I blame her for scrubbing off what I had drawn on my hand. I wanted to ask her if she saw it.

When I tell someone I have a scar on my heart, they never believe me and think I’m being dramatic, or they wait for a punchline that never comes. So I tend to keep that story to myself. And I still don’t remember what I dreamed that day.

* * *

One last injury. You sick of them yet? Imagine how I feel. This is the last of the three that I can’t bear to think about. It is by far the worst.

I lost a fingernail and it took a year to grow back. Well, maybe about half the fingernail. My mom caught me spitting out my gum in her car, and when she climbed back there to find it after I lied and swore it went out the window, she discovered about a dozen hard discs of colorful fruit and mint flavors pressed into the back of the vinyl passenger seat, rolled under the door handle, and tucked under the mats. She was so mad that it scared me. I hadn’t been that nervous around her since I was 4, when she pulled me aside as I was wandering around the house and sucking my thumb with a pillow bouncing around on my back. For some reason, I loved the way that gentle patting felt when I walked. And that day, she pulled my slobbery little hand away from my mouth and told me if was for my own good that she stopped me from sucking my thumb, that she was trying to protect the one thumb I had left. Problem is, the way she said that, it made my 4-year-old brain imagine that thumbsucking was the way I’d lost the first one. Then she make the mistake of telling me about the spiderwebs in her womb so I’d stop asking about the thumbsucking, and, of course, that gave me something else to dwell on.

I stopped sucking it for awhile, but quickly relapsed when I got my braces. To my horror, the dentist and my mom (who were both worried about wasting money if my thumbsucking caused another overbite) used me as a guinea pig to try out a new method to cure the habit. Two sharp, metal prongs were attached to the braces to hang down from the roof of my mouth, sort of like this medieval-looking permanent retainer. Somehow my tongue always instinctively dodged these spikes during the day, but the idea was that an unconscious, nighttime thumb insertion would be thwarted by that diabolical little contraption. Even though I don’t remember being awakened by any strange mechanical snakebites from inside my mouth, it must have worked, because I don’t remember sucking my thumb ever again. At least for comfort.

So, back to the trauma of my mom’s back seat. I set to work with lighter fluid and razor blades and goo remover and peanut butter (old grandma remedy) with stern orders to get all the gum off without damaging the car. With lighter fluid and razor blades? Aren’t those items at the top of a list of what not to give child under 9 to play with? Right behind a shotgun and a chainsaw? It was 124 degrees in the car the day I scraped, dissolved, and stretched that gum loose. I know this for a fact because I took my mom’s thermometer off the back deck (an oversize plastic frog holding the long, numbered tube with a word balloon shouting “Ribbit! Hot enough for ya?!”) and tried to show it to her on my five-minute lemonade break to convince her to please, please, please let me out. And that was also the first and last time I ever used my missing thumb as an excuse to get out of doing something. Whenever I considered doing it again, like when I got tired of hauling bricks, doing push-ups in gym class, helping with Thanksgiving dishes, painting that deck, cutting the grass, jerking off into someone’s mailbox, I am ashamed to remember that steaming back seat, the rivers of sweat pouring down my nose and making it itch, the tangled bubblegum fingers I couldn’t use to scratch. And the instant before my fingernail flipped back as I picked too hard at a dried wad under the ashtray, I caught a glimpse of myself in the rearview mirror, mouth open, tongue filling it like a dying dog.

Is it weird that a fingernail is top of the list of injuries that still make me flinch, ahead of a hole in the heart? I think it’s because the pencil stab was something I did to myself. I jumped on the bed. But the fingernail was something I was forced to do. It wasn’t my idea to clean gum out of the back seat of her car. Remember, you can’t tickle yourself.

And I hate to say this next thing because it’ll sound like it sounds:

It’s real easy to make a list like this of every slice, scab, stab, cut, contusion, break, sprain, and pain you’ve ever had because, when you get to a certain age, you feel like you’ll never get hurt again.

* * *

When I was a boy, I was running and I tripped over something I couldn’t see, and I ended up with a stitch somewhere on my body. The doctor let me keep the stitch when he pulled it out, and I thought it was the greatest souvenir I ever got to keep from the hospital, as if those mystery men in the white coats had let me take an entire organ home with me in a jar. It was just this tiny black thread, dark curls around a tight knot, like a spider that froze up when you breathed on it and never moved again. I ran around showing it to everyone, holding it careful in the center of my hand as it was alive. I went outside to show my brother, ready with a new idea in my head about a spider, my mother’s womb, and the knob of flesh where my thumb used to be. And I didn’t see something on the ground, probably the same something that I’d tripped over to begin with. And the stitch flew out of my hand and was lost forever in the wind. I searched for my spider for three afternoons and cried when my brother had to cut the grass.

::: david - 2:14 PM [+] :::
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