DOIN' THE TIME WARP ON A BROKEN LEG

What happens in the next few seconds of this particular Sunday afternoon, October 5, 2008, is where things get all “Inception”-like, although that movie won’t come out until several years after this whole leggy-snappy thing happens to me. In telling this story of this thing that happened to me 2 ½ years ago, I have to tell you about a memory of something that had happened 3 years before that. And to do that, I have to reference yet another movie that came out 26 years before the incident in question, and maybe even reference a Superbowl from so long ago that…. Hell, the Cincinnati freakin’ Bengals were still relevant, that’s how long ago it was.
So here goes.
If you’ve ever made spaghetti at home, you’ve probably had the experience of picking up a good, thick handful of the uncooked noodles and snapping them in half all at once just before you dropped them into the pot. Well, as I attempted to slide into second base in the middle of a co-ed Sunday softball game in Burbank, California on an otherwise perfect afternoon, there was a cloud of dust, an ungodly pain, and that sound – a sound like spaghetti crunching and snapping – that my left ankle made. It was an awkward, stupid slide, and best as I can figure, my cleats just got caught in the hard dirt and something had to give. I knew instantly that I was hosed. And just to add insult to injury - literally - I think I was out, too.
So here’s what flashed through my mind. I reached down, and found that my left foot was… Oh, I don’t know, I guess you could say “off.” As in, hanging loosely at a very strange angle. Not what a good foot should be doing in the middle of a softball game. And strangely enough, the first thing I thought of was a trip to Montana I took about 3 years before that softball game happened. Coincidentally enough, that memory also involved a ballgame of sorts.
I’d been invited to spend a week with my friend Joe and his family during their annual gathering in Helena, Montana in the summer of 2005. Joe’s dad ran a couple of general stores in town, did well enough that he bought a pair of beautiful log homes on the Madison River, and every summer the whole family – Joe is the youngest of about 10 kids, 9 of them from his mother’s previous marriage (Joe’s dad was one brave sonofagun, I have to give him that. Maybe even as brave as Joe’s mother, who took her 9 children and left her abusive first husband with no job and no prospects. A while later, as the family lore goes, Joe’s father came calling on his soon-to-be wife for their first real date, and Joe’s older sister Judy, all of about 5 at the time, answered the door, looked up at the strange man and said, “Are you going to be our new daddy?” Joe is the only product of his mother’s second marriage) came and spent a couple weeks hanging out, fly fishing on the river, going on canoe trips, eating a lot and playing whiffleball in the front yard. It was during one of these whiffleball games that Judy, now in her 30’s and playing outfield, went running after a long fly ball that sailed over her head. What she failed to take into account was the fact that her visiting siblings had casually parked their cars pretty much wherever they pleased on the front lawn, and so it was probably inevitable that some sort of conflict between ballplayers and cars was eventually going to be played out. Score one for the cars. This particular conflict resulted in the rather gruesome sight of Judy’s right kneecap being shoved clear off the front of her knee, where most good kneecaps are usually found, and off to the side of her leg. Whereupon Judy, remembering what had happened to Mariel Hemingway, who played a track and field athlete who suffered a similar gruesome injury in a movie called “Personal Best” in 1982, simply grabbed the prodigal kneecap and shoved it back into place.
Judy didn’t walk off the field after that. I wound up picking her up and carrying her back into the log home myself (feeling quite the hero, I might add), and she spent the rest of that family reunion recuperating on the couch with a succession of ice packs, and eventually was walking very gingerly around the family manses.
So Judy, (and by extension, Mariel) was what I thought of as I reached down and found my foot sort of… off. (Okay, that’s actually a reference from “Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life,” but I won’t delve too far into that one). So, without thinking too much about it, I grabbed a hold of my foot, and…
I’ll say this, shock is a wonderful thing. When your body finds itself all of a sudden in just waaaaaaay too much pain, its initial response is to say, “Oh, fuck this!” and it kinda just shuts things down. Of course, shock has the potential to kill you, but that’s something for the EMT’s to deal with. In any case, shock, I believe, and its numbing effects, is what allowed me to grab a hold of my left foot and attempt to put it back on again.
It didn’t work, really. However, the grinding of the shattered bones in my ankle was perfectly sufficient to remind me, in case I had entertained any thoughts whatsoever of eventually re-entering the game, that I was, in fact, well and truly hosed. I remember sticking my leg way up in the air. I think the idea was to keep my foot from coming into contact with anything, especially that treacherous patch of dirt in which I was lying.
Oh, the Superbowl reference. Go to Youtube and look up a guy named Tim Krumrie. He was a starting defensive lineman for the Cincinnati Bengals, the heart and soul of their defense really, when they went up against the San Francisco 49ers in Superbowl XXIII, a rematch of the loss they had suffered to those same 49ers (and that same perfect sonofabitch, Joe Montana) in Superbowl XVI. One particular play, the ‘Niners are running the ball from deep in their own territory, and Krumrie sticks his leg out in what looks like an attempt to trip the running back. What wound up happening was that Krumrie’s leg snapped in half just below the knee, and looked like a rubber dog toy as it flopped around, his foot turning backwards as Krumrie collapsed in agony on the ground.
Just in case you need another visual about my ankle.