Headbangers Unite!

I was considering a few other titles for this story. ‘Cheating Death for Fun and Profit’ or maybe ‘When God Blinked’ but really, the most accurate title should be ‘How to Screw Up Pouring Piss Out of a Boot’. It is always quite effortless for me to turn the simplest of situations into a trip to the hospital.

One of my personal favorites was when I was in third grade. One of my buddies and I had to go and take a piss during class. We get the hall pass and off we go to the bathroom. Sure it sounds simple enough, but here was where the plot thickened. Our hall pass wasn’t just some little slip of paper; it was the lid from a Cool Whip tub with the words “Hall Pass Room 218” written on it, really big with a black marker. So my buddy Greg was done taking a piss and standing with the Cool Whip lid/hall pass while I’m finishing up at the urinal. Wait, I forgot one important detail: A Cool Whip lid makes an awesome Frisbee. Anyway, I’m standing there tapping the last of the ‘dew off the lily’ when Greg decides to fling the lid at me. The thing’s sailing straight for my head so, naturally, I duck and bang the shit out of my forehead on the urinal fixture which is three inches in front of my face.

I don’t know if you have ever really hit your head before but, trust me, it bleeds like a motherfucker. So I’m standing there with blood running down my face like a sniper victim and Greg is freaking out. We run to the school office and everyone in the office, including the principal, comes running because I’m bleeding all over the place. So too make a long story short, two stitches and no more Cool Whip lids.

Another time, later the same school year, we had to have recess indoors because it was raining or snowing or some shit. A couple of my friends and I are pressing clay between two books on one of the desks. To get it as flat as possible, we get the bright idea to start sitting on it. So I’m standing up and start to slam my butt down on the books with the clay smashed between them. Just before my ass hits the books, Mike decides it would be hilarious to place a small sharpened pencil, point up, on the books. The pencil jams in the back of my thigh, just below my ass cheek. I jump up, reach back and pull it out and the end of the pencil breaks off in my leg. Blood’s running down the leg of my jeans and we take off to the office, again. Everyone in the office comes running, again, and to this day, I still have a piece of pencil lead in the back of my thigh.

Let’s see… in second grade I broke my arm playing kick ball. I was running in my groovy, low-cut boots and slid on the blacktop just as I was about to kick the ball to the moon. I fell backward and caught myself with my left arm. I broke both bones just above the wrist. Good times. That same year, I was running (probably in my groovy, low-cut boots), slipped and fell face-first into the only pole on the entire playground and chipped my front tooth. In high school, I was standing inside the vestibule to the auditorium, talking to a couple dudes after track practice when a baseball crashes through the window and hits me on the side of the head. Two more stitches and, yes, it bled like a motherfucker.

Maybe the best story involves my beloved skateboard when I was eleven years old. This was during the height of skateboard mania in the late 70s, and I rode my neon orange board everywhere. Down huge hills, over jumps; I even rode it off a neighbor’s roof without a scratch.

One sunny, beautiful Sunday morning I was out dicking around on my skateboard waiting for my dad to get ready to take me and my grandfather to see Star Wars. I had already seen it four or five times and truly believed that my grandfather’s life could not possibly be complete without seeing it at least once. So I felt a real sense of satisfaction when I simply jumped my board off the curb into the street and ended up on my ass, like a million times before. I went to get up and couldn’t stand on my left leg. Man did it hurt. I sat back down and noticed a little blood on my sock just above my shoe. So I pulled my sock down to my ankle and my fucking bone was sticking out of my skin! It had barely pierced the skin, but it seemed as my entire tibia was lying out in the street. Thank God my neighbor was cutting his grass, and he heard me freaking out like a little girl. He ran next door to my house and got my dad. We took off to the hospital, and I found out that I had broken both bones in my lower leg just above the ankle. Six weeks of lying on the couch reading the Hardy Boys as the rest of the summer slowly pissed away.

Even worse, it was good-bye skateboard. My parents made me sell it, and I was not happy about it in the least. So all winter, I was the dork on the bike in the sea of cool kids with skateboards. If I had to tow one more of my buddies down the street, I was going to punch someone.

The next spring, there was a carnival in our elementary school gymnasium, and they were selling raffle tickets for probably ten or twelve door prizes. It was actually some pretty good shit they were raffling away and one of the prizes was, that’s right; a skateboard. All the raffle tickets went into one big hopper, and they would say, for example, “And the inflatable girl goes to” and pull out a ticket. I had only bought three tickets. Well I won, that’s right, the skateboard. I was happier than Homer with a bag of jelly-filled. It was neon green and beautiful.

I was able to sneak around on it for a few weeks, but eventually, I was found out. And my parents wouldn’t budge. The new board had to go. But it wasn’t a total loss. Since the skateboard was still pretty new, I got ten bucks for it. I was enough to buy two new albums at Peaches the very next weekend. Well, if you don’t include tax. I had to get that from my mom.