The night we moved in to our new house, next door to art and his sister’s place, we had moved over from a row of town houses less than a mile away and had gotten a late start and it was late by the time we had moved the last of the boxes into the house. It was actually strange that we were moving at all. We had only been in town for just over a year, moving from an even smaller town in the province, and had already lived in two different town homes. The first of which was what could be considered now as a low cost, even slum, housing. Rows of town homes slapped and shoved together tightly and as cheaply as possible. The steps wooden and often rotting seemingly seconds away from completely breaking through. There were four rows of housing each ten homes long and facing inward to make a square with entrances at each corner and dirt parking on the outside of each row. It was here that I had nearly had my finger severed one day as I was playing inside my friend Robert dad’s truck. We would pretend to be driving the truck and making deliveries as it sat parked in front of his place. He always drove because, as he said, it was his dad’s truck and therefore he got to drive. I didn’t care as much as he, maybe, he thought I did and as we played and he pretended to be driving I pretended to be watching the road and giving the odd direction here and there. Looking back now it was fairly pathetic and a poor excuse for fun but it was what we did and that was that. One day as we were ending our drive I got out of the truck on my side and waited for him to come around to my side as he had to lock the tuck up with a key. I waited and as he came around the side of the truck I had my hand resting on the edge of the fender right where the door and the fender meet and without warning the door shut. Hard. Catching my finger in between the two and nearly severing it at the first knuckle. Robert, seeing my finger lodged in between the door and the fender, quickly opened the door again and as he did I pulled my finger out from the crease and blood, which had already begun to bleed down in to the truck, now flowed freely and quickly down my arm as I held my arm up towards my face. For what seemed like minutes I didn’t move but instead just stood and starred at the now dangling end of my finger as it bled with a color of intense red it was if I had never seen blood before. I was fascinated, scared and ready to cry all in the same moment but hadn’t decided which emotion was going to carry me through this. All at once I began running towards my house, leaving Robert behind dumbstruck by the whole ordeal, screaming and holding my finger as I ran. Three steps up to my door and inside the house I bolted looking for my mom as I ran through the house and up the stairs towards the bathroom, all the while screaming and calling her name. Running my finger under water was all I could think to do and as I was doing this my mom, a nurse who had decided to put her career on hold while she took care of me and my sister, appeared and with one look at my finger said she was calling my dad and that we needed to see a doctor. This was just getting worse. And the gong show was just beginning.
My dad, who was a principal at the high school a mile away, came home and, because of a general lack of doctors in our town, decided to take me 70 miles to where there was someone with at least a rudimentary idea about sewing a finger back together. It all seemed to work out okay until I decided to go back to being a kid with trouble on his mind and a will to match it and the finger and stiches, after much abuse and being the target of much dirt and other such things hardly condusive to healing, decided to give way. Not once or even twice but three times. And all three times I was taken to the local GP and he’d sew me back up. Until the third time when he decided that enough was enough and for the betterment of everyone involved, mainly him, we should take the finger off at the knuckle and be do with it. No more flailing unattached bits above the first knuckle, in fact, no first knuckle at all. And this was when I first discovered that my father had no problem taking certain matters into his own hands, and this, apparently, included sewing his son’s finger back on.
My father had some background in the fine art of driving an ambulance, a volunteer position he took very seriously and when he could reminded everyone that he held the record between Chetwynd and Dawson’s Creek – a distance of 69 miles he did in under an hour. This was, and still is, fairly impressive given the terrain and general road condition and as he loved to point out, a guy with only three fingers. A fact that wasn’t immediately obvious until you shook hands with him and then it was a test to not let on that you sensed something was not right but couldn’t quite figure it out right away. Odd facial mannerisms were the norm whenever any of my friends shook his hand and something I enjoyed watching whenever it happened. His father had not, however, performed any surgery on him in a bedroom on the top floor of their townhouse as my father was about to do. My mother, bless her heart, assisted in the sewing on of the finger and as she had seen this type of thing so many times before barely blinked during the entire thing. A needle, some thread and a hot bath of Epson salts and it was a done deal with my father saying at the end of the whole thing as if to add insult to injury, “Now take care of it or you’ll fucking lose it.” My mom just nodded and put my finger in a white guaze bandage and then went downstairs to do the dishes. It really was a night like any other after all.
The finger, as it came to refered as, became something of a show and tell item and a useful learning tool as well. I learned to never again stick my finger in between things that could chop it in half and cause me to bleed uncontrolably and also how to tell my left from my right and that when setting the table the knife went on the same side of the plate as The Finger. The Finger was also a constant source of entertainment for those around me who needed just that little extra something to bother me about. It wasn’t enough that I had a last name that was a great source of fodder for those witty enough to use it but the finger now added just that much more. I had not yet learned the fine art of fighting, being only six, but soon would and with that came a whole other set of problems but ones that I learned could be fixed. Fixed was maybe the wrong word but perhaps made to go away for a time at least long enough to have to deal with another one that made the other seem to disappear. Along the line I came to like fighting but it took a while and a lot of bloody noses and stiches. I look back at those days as maybe some of the greatest days of my life. Days when I came home with blood running down the sides of my face and hands torn from running them along the pavement as I rolled with another teenager along second ave near the Biltmore bar, all the while trying to hit him just once more before I lost my hold on him. Days and nights of ripped jeans and torn shirts, girls crying as I set upon trying to punch their boyfriends lights out right in front of them. It wasn’t as if I really wanted to be a fighter it just seemed that that’s where I ended up for a while after a while. It seemed that to get along, make a place for yourself in my town you had to kick the shit out of someone. And it couldn’t be just anyone, it had to be someone bigger or with some sort of nasty reputation. And if you weren’t out looking for them, they were certainly looking for you because you’re always bigger than someone and that someone will one day pick you and if you’re not ready, beat you up. This was life in a small town. And more often than not who ever you fought ended up being your next best friend. For a long time I lived in one small town after another and it was always the same and worse when you were the new kid. And it was the same in each of the towns. We drank, we tried to get girls to go to far and we fought. And we liked it.
1 comment:
Eww gross gross.
I don't know how I'll ever treat injuries when just thinking about blood makes me cringe.
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