| Summer of Pain
I remember summers fondly, because I wasn’t in school being bullied, except for my ninth summer, which occurred, coincidentally, when I was nine years old. That was the summer that I learned what gravity was in two separate instances that left their mark on me. Literally.
The first incident was caused by my own stupidity, though my cousin’s stupidity was involved too, his was just luckier than mine.
We were at the Junior High School on a summer night, Family Swim night. The Junior High had an Olympic-size swimming pool, and one night a week they let families come and just play around in the pool for fun. Why it was the Junior High that had the pool and not the High School is beyond me, but it sucked having that damn pool in the school district, because it meant that every year for gym we had to spend two weeks doing swimming things. I like swimming, but not in front of my whole class. I’m not fond of being seen shirtless anywhere, let alone with every girl in the grade looking at me, ruining my chances of ever getting any kind of date. In Junior High, since the pool was right there in the building, we actually had swimming for our gym period; we’d have to get to the pool, change into our swim suits in the locker room, go out to the pool to wait for everyone, get our instructions and do our thing in the water, rinse off, get dressed, and get to our next class within 40 minutes. It was insanity. If you had a morning swim class, you’d stink of chlorine the rest of the day.
The pool area wasn’t very well lit, for some reason, it was always very dim, but it was light enough for everyone to see each other nearly nude, and most of us didn’t like that. Boys and girls alike would stand shivering, with their arms crossed, trying to cover as much of ourselves as we could. Especially the girls, who were just developing their womanly features at the time and weren’t yet used to boys staring at their breasts, which we did. I mean, I know I did, anyway.
So my family and my cousins’ family were at the Family Swim night on this specific night. My little sister was there, wearing her swimmies, the inflatable arm bands that prepare you for future blood pressure tests, as were my cousins, Brian and Denise, who were closer to my age, Brian a year older than us. And our parents sat in the bleachers and blabbed while we did dangerous things in and around the pool, occasionally calling for them to watch us do some pathetic little jump we were proud of.
There were other families there too, of course, and Brian and I had this great idea of going into the shower room about ten minutes early to goof around in there.
There were six shower heads, three apiece on opposing walls, in the smallish, bright, open room where, on other nights, I would see men standing naked and acting casual, and couldn’t imagine myself ever doing that. But no one was in there yet on this particular night, so Brian and I invented a fun new game where we would push all the showers on in a row and sort of slide and skate back and forth under the spray, trying to keep the showers, which were the rotten kind that turned off automatically, all going. Just to ease your mind, neither of us has pursued a career in rocket science or brain surgery.
After about five minutes of this, which I clearly remember enjoying deliriously without our parents there to ruin the fun by pointing out how stupid we were, I discovered how stupid we were for us. I slid from one end of the shower room to the other under the spraying water, and toward the end of my glide, I slipped, something I apparently didn’t expect while hydroplaning across wet tile, and fell forward onto the floor, smacking it with the bottom of my chin, hard. I should point out that the floor was made of those little one-inch square tiles, thousands of them, so it wasn’t a flat surface I landed on.
It didn’t even hurt. I can vividly recall standing up again laughing, not in any pain. Brian was laughing too, as he said, “Here, let me see…,”tilted my chin up a bit, and drew back a hand dripping with blood diluted by the spraying water.
“Oh,” he said.
That pretty much summed it up, I have to say.
I had hit the raised tiles so hard that one of them had punched a kind of half-quarter-sized hole in my chin. I never saw it, but that’s what they told me. I bravely started squealing and crying like I’d been tear-gassed, grabbed my towel off the nearby bench, squashed it against my chin, and fled, looking for mommy. When I finally let my parents and the pool employee look at it, which took a lot of cajoling, they put a butterfly bandage on it, which I’d never heard of before, and I got to see what an emergency room looked like. I got a good look, because we ended up waiting in there for something like two hours amongst moaning, coughing people. Six stitches closed it up, and now there’s an inch-long line under my chin where my goatee never grows, like it was purposely cleared for farming or something.
The next big injury that summer is harder to talk about. I was riding my bike up and down the block, and I guess I was finished, because I headed for our driveway. My sister, three years younger than me, was in the front yard, playing on the Hippety-Hop, a big rubber ball that you could bounce around on. With the Hippety-Hop, you’d get bouncing forward, and within a matter of seconds, because you kept trying to bounce so high, you’d be out of control, like a kangaroo with no brain, until eventually your equilibrium was gone and you were going faster on top than the Hippety-Hop was underneath you, which eventually led to you landing on the lawn with your nose leading the charge into the dirt.
Anyway, as I cruised a big parabola in the road and came zooming toward the driveway, I missed somehow – the driveway was only about twelve feet wide – and I hit the curb, just where it sloped up to its full size from our driveway. We’re talking inches here, between me making the driveway and moving on or hitting the curb with the front tire and having this story to tell. Two inches, tops, maybe less. Now, a lot of my friends – what am I saying, I didn’t have enough friends to use the words “a lot,” rather, many of the neighborhood kids – used to deliberately fly toward this slope in the driveways to make little jumps, but I never really did that; I didn’t live on the edge like that. But those kids zoomed up the slope from an angle; I hit it flush on, perpendicularly, moving fast, and then the both of us, my bike and me, were airborne and headed into our front yard like errant missiles.
I don’t remember the flight through the air, but I remember the landing. My bicycle had been under me when we made the liftoff, obviously, and I guess we both traveled at the same speed and trajectory, because it was still under me as I landed on it, and the chances I’d land on the handlebar sticking straight up were very slim, so the chances of me landing on the handlebar sticking straight up with my penis were as close to zero as they could be, which is why it still surprises me that I managed it. All you kids out there: never underestimate your abilities to do the nearly impossible.
So yes, I’ve finally said it, okay? I landed on the upturned handlebar with my penis, and the handlebar won the match, hands-down. “Hands-down” also describes where my hands went after I ricocheted off the handlebar and planted my face into the lawn. I knew immediately that something tragic had happened, before I even felt the real pain of it. Something in me, even at age nine, knew that my penis had a more important function than just as a spout.
I was up immediately and running toward the front door with my hands down my pants.
“Get Dad!” I yelled to my sister who had watched the whole incident, wide-eyed. She took off for the backyard, where my dad was mowing the lawn.
My mother was food shopping, so I raced through the empty house to the bathroom, where I yanked my shorts leg hole sideways and stuffed a washcloth against my unit, which it seemed was going to die young, at the tender age of nine, never having accomplished all the things it could have, which it unfortunately still hasn’t in the many years since. I sat on the closed toilet lid, panting, and eventually, the cool, damp washcloth had me feeling better. My initial panic died down some. I felt relieved, even though I hadn’t looked at it yet; it would be fine.
My father and sister rushed in the back door. It had taken them only a minute to get in to me, but it was longer than I’d thought, since my sister’s shouting couldn’t be heard by my father over the lawn mower’s engine. When she got to him and he finally heard something, he still couldn’t hear her well enough until he turned the mower off. Who knows what she said, it might have been “Scott got hurt!” or it might have been “Scott broke his pecker!” Either way, it got him inside fast.
They raced to the bathroom door, and there I sat on the toilet, leaning back, panting, holding a washcloth through my shorts leg. “What happened?” my Dad asked, still panicked with the “my child may be seriously hurt” adrenaline swarming through him.
“I hit the curb and landed on my bike,” I said wearily, sounding like a soldier in a movie who’s been mortally wounded, but doesn’t know it yet, as his companion tells him it’ll be all right, knowing he’s a goner. “I think it’s okay though.” Delusional.
“What did you land on?” Dad asked, my sister peeking in the door from behind him.
“My…you know…my…you know…thing. Wiener,” I finally managed to blurt.
Now Dad looked really panicked. The continuation of the family name was on the line. His son had busted his Johnson.
“You have to take your pants off,” he said, “you can’t just sit there like that with a washcloth up your underwear. I need to see it.”
No way, I said. I was no exhibitionist.
“Look, you have to show me,” Dad said, “so I can see if it’s bad or not.”
I looked past my father at my sister, still peering in the door. “Not with Kim there,” I replied.
He told my sister to go to the living room, which she did, and I gingerly pulled my shorts off, revealing my nine-year-old manhood in all its glory. I sat back on the toilet, now pantsless, and we took a look. My boy looked like he’d been in a car wreck, like something out of those driver education movies named Gore on the Highway, and the cops were just going to stand back and let the coroner handle this one.
From what I recall, there were several gashes, I guess they were tears, really, since the handlebar wasn’t sharp, spots where the skin had been sort of torn away, including one spot that was probably a three quarter-inch triangle. The bruising hadn’t started yet, so as time wore on, it looked worse and worse. Dad had me turn it gently so he could get the 360-degree view. I looked to him for comfort, but his face had drained of color, and I realized he didn’t know what to do. Mom usually handled these issues, this wasn’t in his fatherhood handbook. After a few minutes of biting his lip and thinking, he said to me, “I’ll be back.” And he left. I put the washcloth back on my injured member.
Minutes later, he returned, standing in the doorway again. “Mrs. Alberto is going to take a look, okay?” he said.
What! He’d gone across the street to the neighbors’ house and gotten Mrs. Alberto involved now. My friend’s mother! A totally not family member. Unacceptable.
I refused for quite a while, until Dad let Mrs. Alberto come in the bathroom to talk to me. She somehow convinced me, using some womanly talent, to show her my peeper. I remember her squatting in front of me, her big glasses pointed at my privates, which were now publics, and saying, “Ooh. Wow.” No woman has ever said those words about my penis since, regardless of context. Finally, she got up and talked to Dad.
She didn’t know what to do.
So I’d exposed myself to a neighbor for nothing but kicks, I guess.
Dad came in again from the hall. It wasn’t a big bathroom, one adult and me could fit in it at a time. “I’m going to take you to Dr. Stedmill,” Dad said.
Oh, no, uh-uh. This was getting way out of hand now. I cried out against going to the doctor, but Dad insisted, saying he wanted a pro to look at my neener and give his professional opinion. While I sat and tried to argue, he went to the kitchen and actually had my mother paged at the supermarket. “MARILYN TEEL…PLEASE REPORT TO THE SERVICE DESK…YOUR SON HAS RUINED HIS MANHOOD. CLEAN-UP IN AISLE NINE.”
Mom talked to Dad on the phone a minute and came right home. Actually, she pushed her cart over to the pharmacy and asked if she could leave it there until she came back later, would they watch it for her? They said sure. I’m suffering from grievous penile injury and she’s worried she’ll have to start her shopping all over again. She hates food shopping and just wants to get it done as fast as possible. I often wonder what she’d have done if they’d told her no, but deep down, I know the answer, and I don’t win.
They hauled me off to Dr. Stedmill’s office, a sort of creepy, darkish building with plastic animals in the lobby, which all the sick kids could play with while they waited to see him. This was a good business action, because every kid left tons of snot and cough mist and germs all over the plastic animals, ensuring that kids who touched them and were not sick soon would be, which gave him a steady stream of business.
Dr. Stedmill’s office was very horrifying to me as a child, not because it was the doctor’s, but because of the stuff he had. He had these pictures hanging all around of things like onions and peaches with eyes and mouths – photographs, but they then had realistic human bodies under the vegetable head, one was ironing, one was in a tub, there were several. They were terrifying to me, just wrong somehow. It turns out they’re the hallmark of some well-known artist who did those kinds of images and got famous, I found out this year when I was browsing a poster website and came across the same images, which still freak me out. He also had a lollipop container, which was a ceramic bust of Pinocchio, and to get the lollipop, he’d remove the top of the head, from the forehead up, to let us pick. It was just plain creepy to see Pinocchio have his cranium severed every time I got a lolly. It was like you were sucking his brains.
The doctor looked at my mangled member for a few seconds and told my parents he thought he should stitch the cuts. My parents refused to let him do it, they didn’t want me to go through that or something. So we had gone for his professional opinion and when we got it, my parents refused it. Instead, he bandaged it up and told me to put bacitracin on it and keep it bandaged and it should get better. Bacitracin is a miracle ointment, it works like a charm.
So I walked around the house bow-legged for days, like a cowboy, except instead of a ten-gallon hat, I wore a Pac-Man ball cap (“Reach for the sky, Blinky…”). My penis turned an interesting shade of bluish purple, in some areas, which eventually faded, and pretty soon the cuts had healed and I was good as new. The fact that I still haven’t had kids isn’t due to the bike accident, it’s due to a pathetic social life.
I’m actually fortunate I didn’t have an erection when I landed on the handlebar. True, a nine-year-old doesn’t get many erections, but they occurred from time to time. Things could have been much worse, if I’d had one. It’s actually possible to “break” your penis when it’s erect; the veins that engorge with blood during the erection are ruptured and flood the rest of the penis with blood, which puffs up like a Ball Park frank and is almost as painful as listening to Michael Bolton albums. It doesn’t just heal, either, that’s something that requires incisions to drain the excess blood and stitches for the broken blood vessels and then things are still never the same. So, lucky me.
All in all, it was a pretty lousy summer. But as they say, “that which does not destroy me only makes me stronger.” So I must have a very strong chin now, but what did I get down below? A penis mightier than the sword.
© 2005 Scott Teel
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