here's a story i wrote about getting my foot run over. it hasn't been revised. it was due today and it was printing out while i put my shoes on, so it's still a wee bit raw. but enjoy.

I. The Accident

Few people are lucky enough to have events or accidents, catastrophic at the time, shape their lives by the mere realization of their own mortality. If they’re very lucky, they’ll learn humility as well. And perhaps I should consider myself extremely lucky because when I had my foot run over by a car I came to understand my own mortality a little bit more, I became more humble beneath the huge towering embrace of the heavens, and I was able to expand my adolescent mind through doctor-prescribed drugs. That’s not too bad for someone who just wanted a cigarette.

It was Tuesday, the day after Memorial Day, Nineteen-Ninety-Eight. I was in tenth grade at the time. School had just let out and a whole freakish caravan of my friends and I were going to the courthouse to hang up a large wooden sign advertising the annual concert we put on every year. We had a bitch of a time loading it onto Butt’s truck, but eventually we were able to secure it with a shaky system of ropes and bungee cords. I jumped into the backseat of Jeff’s Official Goonie-Mobile, the Plymouth Grand Fury Jeff had taken and desecrated with stickers, decals, and a tacky musical horn. The first thing I did was ask if anyone had an after-school cigarette, which, when you’re in tenth grade and smoked a pack a day like I did, is better than a post-coitus smoke. No one had a cigarette. How could that be? We were teen-agers, unliked and unloved, living on the fringe of our ridiculous high school society. Surely someone should have a cigarette at the very least, perhaps even a joint. But no one had any. Except Kristen. She was in the car in front of us, inching along the street, meticulously avoided the middle-schoolers who had been released from their hellish educations at roughly the same time as we were released from ours. I looked behind us. Derek in his car; Butts behind him, the bringer of signs. I was getting jumpy. I was like the toddler whose mother didn’t feel like putting him down to his nap; I was cranky. I was willing to try anything. The ashtrays in the back of the Goonie-Mobile produced no smokeable cigarette butts. I was able to discern from yelling that none of the middle school students had any either. I was getting desperate. What’s this? we’re stopping? Butts, being the dumbass that he is, somehow became separated from us. We were stopping to wait for him to catch up. That gives me ample time to get out of the car, amble up to Kristen’s, and ask for a cigarette. Right? “Hey guys, I’m going to get a cigarette from Kristen” I say, then open the door and put out my leg, oblivious to what Seth just said about something or other. He’s always talking anyways; this probably wasn’t that important. I place my foot on the concrete and wonder why it’s sliding to the left if we’re stopped. Then it dawns on me that we’re not stopped. This could be interested, I would have thought, if I hadn’t been thinking about my foot being stuck between the tire and the road and being dragged along. And the fact that every nerve in my foot was pissed at me and screaming. So I screamed with them. “JEFF!!! STOP THE F**KING CAR!!!” Asking about what happened later, Jeff and Seth said they had no idea what was happening, that they had no inclination to believe that I was retarded enough to let my foot get caught beneath a wheel. So the mere fact that Jeff stopped the car, per my wishes/screaming pleas, was surprising. He’s usually not soobedient. The car stopped, but my foot was still stuck slightly under the tire. I had the sense to resist as the tire tried to pull me under it, as if it were some evil squid and I were a nic-fitting Captain Nemo. But I held my own, so when the car stopped, I was able to pull my foot out with only a little bit of effort. Every time I burn or cut myself, there’s this small moment where I feel nothing and look at the bubbling blister or the blade sticking into my flesh and think “hmmmm, this is going to hurt right about.....OWWWW!” The same held true for having a tire squish the only left foot I’ll ever have. I was able to jump off of the seat, into the road, and stand for a split second upright, before feeling the full fury of the pain. I, like any other red-blooded American male, brought forth every obscenity I could conjure up in my distressed state and began screaming them, at the top of my lungs. Normally swear words aren’t all that funny; they’re just terms and phrases our parents had always taught us we shouldn’t say. But they become slightly amusing (in retrospect, of course; nothing was amusing at the time) when you’re a mere twenty-five yards from a middle school that emptied it’s doors of students not twenty minutes before you’d arrived. So there I was, in all of my glory, jumping up and down on my good foot and screaming things that would have made Lenny Bruce blush, in full view of shocked sixth-graders and their mom’s in tow. But, as all good marathon runners say, “eyes on the prize.” I hobbled up to Kristen’s car and, short of breath, asked her for a cigarette. With a puzzled look on her face she said (with words that make me feel stupid to this very day), “I only have menthol.” I was furious. My foot had been run over for a MENTHOL cigarette?!?! To hell with them beans. I’m going back to Jeff’s car where real men are and real men would never smoke a menthol cigarette, not even in dire circumstances. I sheepishly hobble back to Jeff’s car and climb back into my seat, noticing that Butts has finally caught up. Seth turns to me, half-smiling, half-chuckling, and says “I told you she only had menthol.” I silently growl and want to scratch out his eyes. Jeff seems more concerned and asks me if I want to go to the hospital. I say no, beyond no uncertain terms. I’ll be okay, I think, it can’t be that bad. But then I looked at my foot. My sock had been ripped off so only tatters remained. The blood was pouring out of the rim of the shoe. I didn’t really want to look; I was hyperventilating and was afraid of what I would find. But I mustered up all of my John Wayneish courage and gingerly pulled off my shoe. The first thought I had after seeing my wound was one of complete and utter horror. My heel looked as if a meteor had crashed into it and exploded my beautiful flesh creating an Oreo-sized crater. Gravel and dirt had been ground into the bloody flesh and the skin surrounding it had rolled up into little balls and curls. Blood was just pouring out of it and landing on my leg and the floor, and was pooling in the quarter-inch deep depression my stupidity had formed. It was the single most disgusting thing I had ever seen, up until that point. A case of dieharra a few years later would take the title away from my foot-related accident, but that’s another story. Like all other men who are reduced to what they are deep down inside, which is simply little boys, I wanted my mommy. And my mommy was a nurse and worked at the hospital, so that was a really big bonus. She could fix me up and not judge me; she could kiss it and make me feel better; she could call me a moron and laugh her head off for stepping out of a moving car. Regardless, I wanted my mother to come and hold me, to tell me that everything was alright, that nothing would get infected and nothing would have to be amputated, and I would feel no pain. The insulation I had built up during high school, my unflinching independence I had always claimed, crumbled before me and I realized what I was: flesh and bones. I’m not different than Julius Caesar in that regard. He was man and he was murdered, proving that he was as fallible as me, the grocer, and Seth laughing in the front seat. We are all flesh and blood, and our beating hearts can be stopped so quickly. Staring at my mangled heel I felt the whole universe shrink to the size of a walnut, compacting so tightly I could hardly breathe. Oh yeah, I really needed my mommy, at that moment more than ever. I’m frantic now. “Jeff! Yeah! Let’s go to the hospital!” I yell, hoping he’ll burn rubber getting us there, something straight out of Miami Vice; he’s a geeky looking Crockett and I’m a wounded Tubbs. But instead of rushing me to the safety of trained medical technicians, he slowly turns the car around and heads towards the hospital.II. Paging Dr. Eeyore Once at the hospital, Seth becomes my Florence Nightingale. To help me get instead to my mom’s department, he carried me as if I were a wounded soldier who deserved accolades for my bravery, dragging me along. At this point, I was essentially in shock and not really cognizant of what was happening around me, so it took us awhile to find her department because my directions were a little skewed. “Uh, take a right somewhere up there.” Eventually we find the right place, but upon asking the perplexed receptionist, we learned that my mom was out running errands. So her boss comes and asks me what’s wrong. All I had to do was to lift the bloodied sock-tatter and she understood that I shouldn’t have been in the cancer department; I should be put in a wheelchair and hurried down to the Emergency Room. Some how, for some reason, one of my mom’s co-workers brought us a can of Dr. Pepper and two plastic cups and then, for some reason which was never explained or made apparent, we were wheeled into my mom’s office and just sat and waited for ten minutes. During that time, Seth permanently scarred my psyche. “Jeremy, look at that. It looks like a worm.” “I bet they’ll amputate your foot.” “Does it hurt much?” “Can I poke it? Would it help if we poured Dr. Pepper on it?” If I hadn’t been slipping in and out of reality, I would have punched him in the face. Eventually, some nurse came and wheeled me away, with Seth following diligently behind, making sure I was going to be taken care of and not overlooked so he could leave with a clear conscience. Upon arrival in the emergency room I went through the required ten minute long “Do you have insurance?” rap, trying to remember my phone number and social security number. I couldn’t quite remember what my name was, but eventually I was cleared for treatment and was allowed to receive medical care at a highly inflated cost. Yippie. But at least it’s better than having a hole in your foot. Oh. Wait. I did have a hole in my foot. By then, all of my friends had convened in the waiting room, checking to make sure that I was okay so they could leave and go get coffee without having to worry. They left my backpack with a nurse and realized the hour was getting late; they had better things to do than sit around the antiseptic hell of a hospital waiting room. We were young, virile, and full of life. Nothing was going to stop them, not even a crippling accident. Fortunately, my mom had arrived at this time, so I wasn’t without companionship while they wheeled me into the curtained examination room and waited for the doctor to come around. My mom, of course, asked me how it had happened. “Uh, I thought the car had stopped and it didn’t...”. I kind of trailed off at the end. I didn’t want her to know I smoked and I definitely didn’t want to tell her that I had my foot run over for a cigarette. And, of course, she wanted more clarification. “Why would you get out of a car in the middle of the street, Jeremy?” sheasked. “Um, I...wanted to....uh....jump on the hood.” That should hold up. She already thought I was crazy; I mean, I was wearing a Hawaiian shirt with plaid pants on that particular day. You’ve got to be insane to dress like that, or at least that’s what my parents always used to tell me. But that didn’t matter, because I was the most stylish guy in that emergency room. Eventually, after the customary twenty minute painful waits all emergency rooms use, a nurse showed up to look at my ouchy. Her first word, which I’m sure is some medical term I was never quite clued in on, was “gross.” Thanks. That’s comforting. “Is that gravel?” the nurse asked. “Yeah, it’s from the road,” I told her. “Well, then you’ll need a tetanus shot. I‘ll be right back.” Yea! Just what I wanted: MORE PAIN! Well, when she left to go get the necessary supplies to give me a tetanus shot, she didn’t mention that she’d be bringing two interns to help her or that they were giving me the shots in my ass. BUT, she completely redeemed herself by bringing an ampoule of Demerol to inject along with the anti-lock jaw thing. In all of your life, you’ve never seen a boy so cheerful, oblivious to the searing pain in his foot, as he barred his ass to three strangers and his mom. I didn’t even care if I’d worn clean underwear or not. I was getting DRUGS, man. Everything would be okay. The Demerol didn’t kill the pain, as the name painkiller would lead you to believe it would, but it completely distracted me from the whole situation. I was able to ignore the pain and focus on more important things, like trying to get my mom to blow the surgical gloves laying just out of my reach up, so I could have a fat-handed balloon to play with. But she wouldn’t. Apparently, being a nurse and all, she has more respect for the medical profession then I would have thought. Eventually the doctor showed up, and that was the most comforting thing I’d had up until that point: his appearance. Ignore the drugs and my friends caring about me and my mother; this doctor was a slob. His clothes were wrinkled and he had a five o’clock shadow. He wore a black polo shirt with Eeyore from Winnie the Pooh, wrapped in a blanket with a thermometer sticking out of his mouth, as it’s monogram with is name beneath it. I liked that. The guy had a sense of humor. That could translate into more drugs in the end. Plus, my mom knew him from work, so they had a rapport which could turn into more sympathy for me, his patient, which in turn would equal even more drugs. I was giddy by this point. He looked at my foot. He pulled out a penlight and studied it. He kind of chuckled when I told him I had voluntarily stepped out of the car. He even looked at my shoe, for some reason. “Well,” he said to me, “if you hadn’t been wearing your thick, leather tennis shoes when it happened, you probably would have lost your foot.” Now that hit hard. If I had been wearing my canvas Chuck Taylor All-Stars instead of my leather Airwalks, I would only have one foot as I sit and type this story out. No one wants to hear that. It’s too truthful, harsh, and real for us. We never want to hear that the slightest difference in the smallest detail, in this case, my shoes, could have vastly different consequences depending on how our day goes. That’s just too deep when all I really wanted was a cigarette. “Wait here for a minute,” the doctor said, “and I’ll come back, clean it out, and bandage it up.” “What? I’m not getting stitches?” I ask, thinking every major wound require stitches. “No, there’s no way to stitch it up. You just have to let it heal by itself and let the skin grow back. It should take about a month, but will be very painful for the first week or so.” That didn’t really bother me by that point. I was high and still reeling from the whole “your shoes saved your foot” thing. An offhand mention to a week of pain wasn’t a huge concern for me at that point. I just sit there with my mom. It’s a Norman Rockwell-from hell type scene. A wounded boy laying in a hospital bed with his mother by his side , but a large chunk of his heel is missing, revealing the bloody inner-workings of the skin. But what did that matter? Precedents and history are useless when something concerns you for the first time; “it’s new to you, and that’s all that matters.” No comparison really works. Just tell it like it is and everything will be cleansed. A very Catholic outlook, but it works for cathartic value at least. The doctor came back with an EXTREMELY long needle and a cleaning kit. He proceeds to give me about twenty shots of a local anesthetic in my wound, numbing it and the rest of my foot completely. Then he takes this thick bottle, holds it upside down closely over my injury, squeezes it, and releases this painfully sharp stream of water. He does that for about fifteen minutes until it’s properly cleaned and he wraps it up with a thick layer of gauze and bandages going around my entire foot. The blood seeps out of the white bandages almost immediately, so he has to do it again. He hands me some fifty dollar crutches, prescriptions for antibiotics and Vicodin, then sends me out into the world, wounded, but essentially okay. By this time, my dad has arrived to take me home. He’s standing in the waiting room holding my back pack and looking extremely concerned. When I hobble out of the Emergency Room on my new crutches, he looks relived. ‘So, he’s not going to die’ I can almost hear him thinking. He helps me get in the car, and what should I find on my seat but a pack of cigarettes, my brand. I find a lighter and spark up the greatest cigarette of my life.III. Vicodin Siddhartha That Eeyore doctor wasn’t kidding; my foot HURTS. And it hurts badly. Taking the recommended dose of Vicodin is useless. It’s hard to sleep and the pain won’t stop. I’m at my wits end. I’m squirming from the pain so much I can’t even sit still and watch TV. A few hours after I got home, Jeff comes over with Andrea, my girlfriend, and Jeff Niemi, who was really worried about how I was doing. Not once did they make fun of me or mock me for hurting myself, which I had assumed everyone would have. They even brought me tongue-in-cheek presents: a new lighter and a pack of cigarettes. I love my friends. They came over and were sincerely concerned about how I was doing. Well, I knew Andrea would be concerned because, at the time, she was my girlfriend which means I owned her and she had to look worried. But Jeff should have been mad. This was the first week he had his driver’s license and he goes and runs over my foot (which, to this day, I always say it’s his fault, when of course it isn’t). And I never really hung out with Niemi; he was just a guy who was occasionally around. A good, friendly guy everyone liked, but I still don’t consider him that much of a friend. But he heard about my little accident and was worried, so he came over to see how I was doing. That’s why I love my friends. Jeff and Seth are still my best friends to this day, and the love and respect they showed me after I stepped from a moving car was a big part of securing our bond. Unfortunately, when they stopped by I was in extreme pain and it had just occurred to me to start upping the dosage of Vicodin. So about half an hour after my friends show up to profess their worry, I turn into a bubbly mess of man, bloody rags and all. It became hard to form sentences or make much sense. But, the pain was gone, so I was up and moving around, jumping on Jeff’s lap and screaming and really getting what kicks I could before the whole thing went up in flames. A problem I knew I would have in a couple days is cabin fever, too; I wasn’t about to leave the house. I had to suckle all of the enjoyment I could from mama life’s teet before the grim confined reality of the situation set in. Eventually my friends left to go to their respective homes and my dad retired to bed, leaving me alone, but with a full bottle of painkillers and an insatiable appetite for the euphoria large doses of prescription narcotics provides. When you’re high off of painkillers, it feels as if you’re wrapped in a warm blanket, a second skin, one that prevents you from seeing yourself as who you are and insulates you from the harsh realities of being awake and alive in America today. That’s a feeling I enjoyed. I enjoyed being able to step outside of myself into a warm opiate bath, forgetting even my name or reason for being in a certain room. All of my life, all of the pain I’ve ever felt, could be completely negated with enough Vicodin or Codeine or Valium. And those drugs brought on even more pain. Both Vicodin and Codeine contain Tylenol, which, if taken regularly enough and in high enough doses, which I was doing, rips open your stomach and creates ulcers and more pain. You do these drugs enough and you’re friendships and relationships begin to lose their meanings. But, before I completely disappeared in a drug haze that would occupy and destroy about five months of my life, I was able to completely expand my mind and realize a few things about the elusive “Self” we always search for. I was never much one for organized religion to point me towards the light; I found that drugs can temporarily do the same thing. On the second day of my week long opiate odyssey, I took about five pills at once accompanied with Pepcid AC (which thins the blood, creating a longer and more powerful high). At first, it felt like my chest was being sat on, that I was slowly being suffocated by the mere presence of the room. I couldn’t breathe; I couldn’t think; nothing made sense. Then, whatever held my chest, released me into a dark, warm pool of emptiness. Nothing was nothing. My body was flooded with relief and for the first time since I began thinking for myself in about the sixth grade, things made sense. It was this deep feeling of relaxation and relief, my new understanding for the world around me. I realized that so little is very important, but nothing is insignificant. Everything has it’s place in the world, regardless of how f**ked up the world is or will be. I was as important as Yassar Arafat and the world loved me just as much. Without even opening my eyes, I could say my future lay before me like a vast blue canvas, waiting for me to walk across it (limping foot and all) to leave my footprints and give the world meaning. That sounds like megalomania, but it wasn’t. It was complete understanding of what the world had in store for me up until that point. All the bad events, the sinister memories I’d rather forget, from my childhood and from high school, weren’t forgotten but weren’t looked upon with shame or fear anymore. The bully who taunted me in the third grade made as much sense as a tomato ripening on the vine. In Herman Hesse’s Siddhartha, Siddhartha realizes that all of life is a river flowing from the forehead out. That all living things are part of this great flow and are equal parts and have equal roles in the water. That’s what I found. It didn’t require the years of absolution or fasting or hours spent mediating as Siddhartha did; it only required a little help from a pharmacy. That initial success of insight through drug use led me to other drugs, different drugs, in an effort to find the truth. But they don’t really help in my pilgrimages to Truth as much as I thought they would, so enlightenment through drug use has largely been discredited by the highest source on the matter I know: me. That’s the story of my foot getting run over. To this day I have a circular pink scar where the pressure caused my heel to explode. I also carry with me the nuggets of knowledge I found while popping pills. So in every tragedy, I guess there is a silver lining. NOTE: This story is dedicated to Seth Bules, my Florence Nightingale for a day, and to Herman Hesse, for being such a good writer and inspiration.