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December 21, 2004
I Wasn't Thinking About it, I Swear
Having been recently accused of seeming like a drunk and pervert I've been racking my brain to find a time I wasn't drinking or thinking about sex. I searched long and hard through my surviving brain cells. I watched my life in rewind looking for a single moment not occupied with these vices.
I was watching for a while when I decided to press stop and then press rewind again, so I could go back faster (unfortunately I was assembled during the VCR era and can't just skip back scene by scene like you can with those fancy digital video disks).
I got to Sixth grade. Nope. Drawing naked pictures of of your teacher counts as sexual.
Fifth grade. Damn. Detention for giving pornos to other kids at school.
Third grade. I got it! I arrived. I haven't always been drinking and thinking about sex.
We had a huge old elm tree in my yard. My dad tied a rope onto one of the branches and my siblings and I used it as a swing. It was our Tarzan rope vine. Our Indiana Jones whip. We'd run at it, grab on and fly. But all the trips were one way; we'd have to let go before it swung back to the tree because was so close to the tree trunk.
The branch on which it hung was much more vertical than horizontal and the rope was attached very close to where that branch split from the trunk. If you swung away from the tree and then back it was very likely you'd come into bodily contact with the tree.
The tree was at the edge of our yard along the sidewalk. On the other side was a small grassy area between the sidewalk and the street. That grassy patch is where our one-way flights would end. We'd run at the tree, fly over what the neighbors thought was a sidewalk, but we knew to be a snake and piranha filled river (which turned back into a sidewalk just in time for us to run back across in preparation for another flight), and land in the safety and comfort of the patch of grass.
One day our dad came out to watch us enjoying his handiwork. Seeing us perform our short little flights, which looking back were simply rope aided leaps across the sidewalk, he decided we were really under-utilizing it. "You can swing so much higher than that." "Don't you want to swing farther? Faster?"
He pushed us and we flew higher than before. It was great. I could do it all day. But not my dad. He had other plans. Being the smaller of the two boys I was the first to experience the next level.
He had me grab onto the the rope, then he grabbed me by the ankles. He backed up lifting me over his head. I was higher then than I had ever even flown before.
I remember being scared as hell. "I'm going to die" I thought. I must have screamed. "It'll be fun."
He threw me forward.
I was flying through the air.
I brushed up against the tree.
I hit the apex of the swing. I had to let go before swinging back and potentially dying when I smacked into the tree. I had a roller skating party to go to. I didn't want to die. How could I miss the roller skating party? Maybe this time I'd win a pair of those vinyl fingerless gloves. All the guys bought them at the skating rink. All the guys but me. But they had raffles and you could win things they sold behind the counter: glow sticks, belt buckles, feather clip on earings for the girls and more flamboyant guys, a skate party in your honor (which meant that you got in free as long as you invited all your friends), but best of all, fingerless gloves.
I had fingerless gloves waiting for me, I had to bail.
I let go of the rope and flew through the air. I imagine arms and legs were flailing. Flailing until I landed on the curb. I landed feet first, which was a good thing, but only my heels landed on the curb, my toes, especially the toes on my right foot impacted the street. Then I rolled out into the street.
I got up and limped back into the yard. I was in pain, tearing up. Still, I had a roller skate party to go to.
I fought back the pain, put on my skates and rode around the rink a few times. I sat a lot, I played air hockey. I felt a little depressed when I didn't win the gloves. Then I felt my hugely swollen foot when I took off my skate at the end of the day.
The skate kept the swelling down, but it was still almost twice its normal size. And it hurt like hell.
I got back home and carrying one shoe in my hand limped up to my mom and told her my foot hurt.
"Mom. My foot hurts."
"Oh my god! What happened. It's huge."
"Dad made me go on the swing."
"What?"
"He pulled me back too far and I landed in the street."
"Your dad isn't here."
"Before the skating party."
"Oh my god! That was hours ago."
"Mommy, it hurts."
We went down to the emergency room and got my foot x-rayed. It turns out my foot only swelled up like that because I had broken 5 toes.
There is no way to effecitvely cast toes, so all I could do was use crutches and wear hard soled shoes.
Yeah. I showed up to school for the next month wearing penny loafers and no gloves when everyone else was walking around with fingerless gloves and athletic shoes.
There's no way I could have even thought about sex back then.
Posted by calculatoronfire at December 21, 2004 12:16 PM