A History of Injury

When I was three years old, I came into the kitchen while my mother was making candles. I mistook a jar of candlewax for juice and attempted to drink it. I immediately started choking as the hot wax clogged my windpipe. My mother, a nurse, threw me on my back and jammed a finger down my throat to clear the obstruction. I spat out the wax and clamped my baby teeth hard on her finger. She managed to get her finger out, but needed several stitches.

Five years later I was jumping around on a neighbor’s porch when I slipped and fell, striking the side of my head a glancing blow on a pointy brick step. I ran screaming back to my house, blood running between my fingers as I clutched the side of my head. My mother hustled me into the bathroom where she ran wet paper towels to wipe the blood and compress the wound, which as it turned out was a comically small gash in my ear. We went to the ER anyway, where I was given one stitch, possibly out of pity.

A year after that I was playing with a neighbor boy named Richard on a new paved dead-end circle street behind our house, the center of a new development. There were no houses yet, but because of all the earthmoving and grading, there were massive piles of Alabama red sandstone rocks. We took turns throwing chunks of sandstone high into the air, watching the fragile rocks explode into clouds of dust and clay sand clods when they hit the pavement. Richard started jogging easily around the circle as I tossed rocks into the middle. I heaved a heavy one, and watched in slow motion as the parabola of the rock inexorably intersected with Richard’s circular running path. The rock hit him in the temple, not exploding into dust at all but thunking thickly into bone, and he went down, crying, blood running from a cut above his eye. I ran and got his mother, led her back to where he lay, then took off home and hid in my room. Later my father found me, told me how much trouble I was in, and as punishment had me bend over so I could be spanked with a wooden yardstick, which broke in half after a few solid licks. Richard didn’t need any stitches and he forgave me, though his parents never did.

The very next summer we were a gang of a dozen kids playing on the same circle, now ringed with half-built houses. I loved climbing around the incomplete walls, walking between the framed pine two by fours, inspecting the suggestions of rooms and stacks of countertops and doors and plastic wrapped toilets and sinks. A neighboring teen named Rex bet his friends he could jump longwise across the rectangular gap cut in the floor for a basement stairway, with the stairs not yet built below. He jumped and the soles of his sneakers hit the ledge on the other side. He toppled backward through the hole with a scream, cut off by a sickening crunch. We ran to the edge and I looked down to see him flat on his back, trembling, arms bent the wrong way, a constellation of blood framing his head. Rex arched his neck, eyes twisted shut, and spat out a throatful of more blood over his neck and chest. We all started shouting and some bunch of us, including me, ran for his parents, who followed us stumbling and white faced back to the construction site. An ambulance and fire truck came, and Rex was tractioned to a stretcher and taken away. He was gone for a month, healing broken bones, but he did come back with his casts and bandages, though for some reason I remember he was meaner after that. I went back to the house the week after the fall to look at his blood on that floor, but it had already been wiped away.

I was twelve or thirteen, bored with my Star Wars action figures and toys generally, but to kill time one long afternoon I posed them on a bedpost and punched them across my room, like some vengeful giant. But once I swung too low and punched the bedpost instead, cracking a metacarpal bone. It wasn’t bad enough to require a cast, but I did have to wear a splint for six weeks. I was too embarrassed to tell anyone how it really happened, including my parents, so I just claimed I accidentally hit the wall above my bed while stretching. I gave away my action figures to younger kids in the neighborhood.

In my early twenties I was cutting down seven-foot weeds in my parents’ front yard, using a long butcher knife because these were soft milkweed, and you could slice clean through their stalks. What I didn’t know was the weeds had clusters of grasshoppers sunning themselves at the tops, and these grasshoppers rained upon me when I cut down their roost. I hate jumping bugs more than anything, so at first I was frozen in horror until my eyes fixed on one grasshopper crawling on my forearm. Instinctively I hacked at it with the knife, which of course missed the bug but did lodge the knife in my wrist. Six stiches, and I had to explain to a counselor that this was not in fact a botched suicide attempt, but something much stupider, somehow.

My friend Joey has a house in Huntsville, Alabama, at the base of a small mountain called Monte Sano. There’s a road just above his house famous for its dangerous curve. Twice I’ve been there when someone has squealed tires nearly missing the turn. But once I was there late at night for a party when we heard a loud bang followed by a car horn, stuck on. No tires had time to squeal. We climbed up the hill to find a car compacted against a tree, horn blasting in monotone, all its lights on including the interiors. The driver’s side was nothing but tangled metal, not survivable. The front passenger door had flipped open, bent and reversed against the fender. There was a visible passenger too, a young guy bent double by the car’s contortions. I could see his face by the dome light, eyes wide open, a slow but steady stream of blood running from his nose and mouth like a faucet. He was dead, and so was the driver. Police, paramedics, and fire trucks came. A perennially surly and drunken neighbor, also come uphill to gawk at the scene, fell struggling and roaring into a ditch and was mistaken by paramedics as part of the accident. They had him strapped to a gurney and on the way to the ambulance before we managed to explain who he was, and that this was just how he was, all the time.

As I advance into middle age and embrace exercise with more enthusiasm than expertise, I’ve given myself a hernia, and a labral tear in one shoulder. More recently I’ve developed incipient arthritis and tendonitis in the other shoulder and one hip. Yet I’ve come to enjoy the penitent, dull repetition of physical therapy stretches and exercises, as well as the semi-brutal joint manipulations of a physical therapist who can bend and reconfigure my body in ways I did not think it could go. But lots of people have it so much worse at my age, for so many reasons, and many never even get far enough to worry about middle age complaints. In this way, minor pains become pleasures of a kind.

None of my siblings, all older than me, remember the story about me swallowing candlewax and biting my mother’s finger. My father, who is now 90 years old, doesn’t remember it either. His short-term memory isn’t the best these days, but he always seems to recall the past with great clarity. My mother died in 2019 after a long and beloved life, so I can’t ask her. It’s bewildering, and it makes me wonder about other old stories I’ve been telling over and over. Surely my family would know about the candlewax story, if it was real. Talking to my dad about it, I wonder if I could have made up this story long ago, and I’ve been telling it for so many years I believe it actually happened. He laughs. “I do that all the time,” he says.