25 YEARS SINCE THE ACCIDENT

Sledgehammers and Ice Picks

This is how I remember the night the Berlin Wall was torn down, twenty years back. Times past. Most of you know about the car that hit me in March of 89, and the night of the Wall coming down had me again at Holy Cross Hospital. Sometime in October, the plates holding together what was left of the bones in my left forearm broke in half, and after a few days, well, the second photo tells you what my arm looked like. I, of course, took the photo of my arm because everyone else was creeped out. (Nothing new there, even now.)

So there I was, my left arm feeling like it was submerged in molten goo. The television was on, I was doped up on Demerol every two hours and Tylenol#3 every hour, and so I had to be told--and I am not making this up--that I was watching Tom Brokaw reporting and NOT Arnie Becker on L.A. LAW. I do not remember the wall being torn down, nor do I remember Noriega and the invasion of Panama deal. I was glad when 1989 was over, and I'm glad that that wall stayed down.

The Tears of My Tracks

Tears as in rips, not the crying kind. I found out I had a way (OK, OK, my 10 yr old niece found this out and showed me) to take a 1.3 MB photo with the webcam. So I thought, hmnnn. Let's see what I can take photos of off of my face and arms. The head one might show an odd scar shaped like England, still there since I broke my arm in 1973, riding a bike in Kentucky. There's one of me pointing/pulling at my hand; back in the winter of 1983, some guy on angel dust pulled a knife on me on the A train (as they were then called), and like a fool, I slapped his hand, somehow smacking the damn knife itself. So much for depth perception. The guy did cut out, though. My first experience with idiots and meltdowns. I knew I was going to love being a writer. The cut was to the bone, I found out later, 26 years later, its hard to see even when I'm tanned. The other shots try to do my left arm justice, what the "good" scar and the "bad" scar loom like. Also, a nice perspective thing to show how might left arm really looks when I'm not bending it into normal fashion when I'm around people. My knuckles really don't hit the ground, no worries.

March 18th 1989: Same Old Song

Yea, yea, the anniversary of the day I was hit by the car. Happened before I met Sid Williams, but I thought this bar in Blue Island had a cool sign, and it was taken the weekend before the accident, and everything I am wearing in that photos was shredded. I tried to take a decent webcam shot of the middle of my left forearm where there is missing bone and poked my finger in my cheek where I am missing four of my bottom teeth. (I wasn't going to wear a partial at the age of 29).

That lady that died tonight from the skiing accident. She felt fine, then got dizzy later. There are events that simply do not exist in my immediate family's lives, its as if I followed a different string reality and then course-corrected back into the one I share with them, you, and, unfortunately, everyone on Fox News. The two bones in my left forearm were severed and I was not operated on for six days. There was a reason for this, the first photo shows how my arm was wrapped. I was hit on a Saturday, it was much worse weather than it is today, there was ice on the ground and snow remnants on the curbs. Ended up I could not be operated on right away because there were a bunch of gang fatalities from Marquette Park, which was right across California Avenue from Holy Cross. I guess I should be grateful for those punks and their skirmish. I had been knocked out with Demerol and came out of it around 3 PM. I turned my head and it was like my eyes had spilled out of my skull on bungee cords. I was so scared by this that I pissed all over myself. I was petrified to move my head again, even when the neurologist asked me to. I had three contusions over my right eye. If the doctors had operated, I might have died from the bleeding in my brain. My scarlet sponge brain. Every day I had CT scans and the occasional MRI. Finally things looked safe enough to get my arm sewed back on. My folks seem not to remember that, only that I had broken my arm. I don't care, but its a tell on why I'll talk about my father more than I will my mother or my sister. I can imagine that lady being okay after her ski accident and not realize she'd be dead in a day. I try not to remember those minutes when I couldn't call for the nurse and my eyesight just bonged back and forth and its just so damn hard to explain it was like someone physically slapping my eyesight back and forth and I felt myself the warmth of my urine and could only drool until the nurse arrived.

The Tombstone Will Be My Diploma

From a quote by Eartha Kitt, who passed away today. She said how she learned something new every day, and that the tombstone would be her diploma. I'm lucky I even heard the news, its been so crazy here. From hideously cold temps to thunderstorms and literal four inch stacks of ice in the streets, and now more freezing rain and flash flood warnings because of the tons of snow and ice; we surpassed the wettest December on record about a week back. I get spasms in my neck quite easily, and last night (well, early today), I was checking that the water was at the 12-cup mark in the coffee pot and then I was cold-cocked as my neck jerked and my temple went into the corner of the cabinet. I woke up on the floor holding my head, I doubt if I was out for more than a minute or so, my hand covered in blood, but very little on the carpet. The wound bled for about an hour, but I was able to pour SuperGlue into it and then sleep with a bandanna on, like I was a pirate. Before and after shots up above, you can see SuperGlue works wonders, so who really needs health insurance? I haven't had any since March 2005.I think this will heal fine, so I'm still at Scar 39. If you visit my blog 18 March 1989, you'll see most of the other scars. Then there's my Mitchum blog. Man, Bobby the Mitch and Eartha the Kitt in a film together, that would have been the cat's pajamas.

Heading west into the black...Your chattel, Wayne

First Snow Cuts The Deepest

I'm surprised I've never written about this before, maybe its because the last two years I've been doing this blog, the first snows have always come on days that I have been working and just didn't blog. I'm going to talk about sensation. My right side is always a mess because of the cerebral palsy, but my left arm has no real circulatory system, after all the operations on my left arm made the nerves wired wrong. We've had temperatures at -15 wind chill the past week, piece of cake after the first time. Snow is different, and this time it wasn't even from shoveling; I used the snow blower. I came back in and had to email NY before an editor's office closed and then a fellow writer in CO re: a joint project. The photos above might help by at least portraying my odd posture. The sensation takes me back to when my arm was in a bag of ice for days at a time throughout the spring of 1989. Demerol every three hours, Tylenol w/c codeine every half hour, yet I felt almost every minute of it. Fire and ice at the same time. I look at my own fingers yet they move as one, as if encased in some astronaut glove. Heat running through my palms at the same time my one finger touching the keyboard having the feeling of frozen cement. Just as with the ice bag in 1989, my fingers were splayed as if I was a hero drawn by Jack Kirby, the wrists cracking from cold and yet the palms burning up. Then the fingers, to type, I hear the wrist make a snapping noise, then its like I am a giant becaui se I start hittingmutiple keys at obnve and tyhemn I;'m poundinfg ojn the keybo0ard lijke a deaf man trying to tell someone a clue of some sort. The first snow always affects the skin baggie that is my left arm. A nemesis that always comes back to start the battle anew. Its good to be in a fighting mode again. Your chattel, Wayne

Don't Pay The Ferryman

For those reading the previous post and learning about my first death for their first time, I've included some photos of my arm over various periods of 1989. I wore casts for 291 days, but at times got to air my skin out. All of my diary entries, as they might be called, are in DarkTales' TRUE TALES OF THE SCARLET SPONGE. The Sponge could either be my gauze around my arm in the early days or the contusions to my brain which still haunt me with my nosebleeds. I'm not showing the photos of me after laser surgery was done to remove two of the clots in 1993. And so this part of my tale keeps me forever in a time loop, March 18th 1989 to now to March 18th 1989 as if the first time machine was created on March 18th 1989 and therefore I could not go back further in time, to my previous life, because the barrier was the day the time machine was built. I guess I should pay the ferryman after all, because I did get to the other side. God help me...Wayne

On March 18th, I Am My Own Constant

Everyone knows of the accident, 19 years ago this morning. Same kind of weather, rain with melting ice on the ground. Every March 18th, I reflect on how I've changed from that Saturday. I have more pains from being older, but I'm in better shape than when I saw the 55th Street Cubetia upside down at five feet in the air (a memory etched in my mind like a tear in my brain tissue). I feel as if I'm left behind by faster typists, but I was able to keep up with things in the days of Galaxie Twelves and dot matrix printers. Laying on the ground with the bashed leg, the trashed bones, the bloodied head. I learned to use my right hand for the first time in my life--look how fat that still-broken left hand looked, straight from Bobek's sausage factory!--and now my one right finger can still hit the shift key. When I was standing in front of Sid's tavern, I was wearing everything I had on the following Saturday. The bones tore through the turtleneck, a hooded sweatshirt, and the padded suede jacket in the other photo. Another setback, nine operations and part of my right hip in my left arm, a hollow spot Dennis Etchison once called "deadspace" in a story, and I'm left typing with one finger, my thumb in the air. Like I'm typing with a flesh pistol. So if I need a Constant, something to keep me grounded (or at least something to keep me from taking a dirt nap), I think of myself on March 18th 1989 and then on every March 18th afterwards. Exxon Valdez. Iditerod dog races. Hurricane Hugo hit during my fifth operation. Most days, I'm good. But I never NEVER think about Friday, March 17th, 1989, or any day before that. The days that I was still alive.....Wayne

First Cut Is The Deepest

I had a different post planned, but that was before we got three inches of snow in the past two hours. Back from shoveling, I'm typing with two fingers curled under my left middle finger, the only one with any real circulation. Check out the photos, the nine operations effectively ruined me below the elbow, part of my forearm is hollow, part thick with a chunk of hipbone. Knuckles are glass, a cliche, but still. Wait, let me concentrate through my grinning: nope, the closest I can come is nails through each joint. Red hot nails. My left hand is shaded in goth. It will all be better soon, or so I lie to myself. Dig the first photo, me in Nashvile WFC90 after the first scar came visiting. That was when I was Jimmy Neutron meets Charles Nelson Reilly. Thank Christ there were no author photos back then...Wayne

Stepping Into The Twilight Zone With Dr. Richard Kimble

Back in 1989, the sign in the first photo read GAGE PARK FINER FOODS, and I marveled as I read the words from impossible angles. The break in the traffic in the second photo shows where I was standing, on the yellow line. It was 11:11 AM. When I hit the ground, everything in my mind split open and outward; the best that I can explain this is by thinking of a wet handful of sand hitting cement. I was unconscious for 20 minutes, and when I woke up, the first thing I heard was the Pakistani grocer calling out "Not to touch! Not to touch!" I could not see my arm, my head was bleeding, and in some only-Wayne-could-do-that way, after my arm broke, my own fist knocked four teeth out from behind my left jaw. While I was gone, because I to this day KNOW I was no longer part of this life, I was in a grey fog, like the false dawn an hour before the sun rises. I recall looking around, shrugging, and walking forward. There was no light, no flashing neon, no wisps of blackness swirling around my ankles. I walked for awhile before he came into view. I swear on the Polish Bible on my shelf, I came face to face with David Janssen, Dr. Richard Kimble, THE FUGITIVE himself. Dead at the age of 49, on Valentines Day, 1980. Kimble was always on the run, looking for the one-armed man who killed his wife. My subconscious was still functioning, trying to tell me I had one arm now, at least for the next 68 days. Kimble had this quirky smile, he'd use it when someone like Ed Asner or Terry Savalas said that he looked familiar. He stood before me and I could not pass him. He gave me that smile, somewhere between Elvis's sneer and Etain's smirk, and said that it wasn't time yet. Nothing about my Creator, my Higher Power. There was nothing around us, no deserted streets, maybe it was false dawn because The Fugitive was filmed in glorious black & white. I am sitting here, my chin in my palm, recalling the image. He put his hand on my shoulder and patted it, as if he knew I was going to make it. The television doctor, my emissary. And then he was gone, I was staring at gravel in my eye and listening to the Pakistani man. Not to touch. Not to touch.