Scars
1. Dan vs. pavement (age 19): scar by my right eye
Sophomore year, post-Flat Hat writer’s meeting. I get on my bike to ride back to my Ludwell apartment. (I live in Ludwell with with two guys I will never speak with again, for the most part. One is the boyfriend of a friend, the other is some sucker sophomore we found on the Student Information Network who had a lottery number good enough to get us a Ludwell triple)
I ride sans helmet, because I have that devil-may-care attitude that has won me so many admirers. I’m in front of the old College bookstore when something happens. I suppose my front wheel came off, somehow, although I don’t know how it just “comes off.” That’s what I tell people, anyway. I wasn’t going very fast, I wasn’t losing balance. I just remember falling. But before I know it I’m doing a faceplant on the pavement, embedding gravel into the right side of my face.
I was tangled in that bike until these people found me there, apparently on the way to some sort of Christ-y activity. They called the ambulance, along with an off-duty paramedic. I don’t remember how they gathered there, because I was lying flat on my back telling them to just go ahead and call the ambulance. I wasn’t planning on getting up. I guess I can truly say I was touched by an angel that day. I never saw either of their faces, but I’m sure neither of them looked like Della Reese.
At the hospital, I got cleaned off by this burly man-nurse. I was 2 and a half years from confronting any sort of sexuality issues at the time, but he was totally hot. At the time, I was still in my “I don’t have time to come out of the closet, I have another extracurricular activity to join” phase. But he dabbed the shrapnel out of my face and we made chit chat.
Medical attention needed: ambulance service, cotton swabbing done by hot nurse, no stitches but they put this glue on my face to hold the cuts together.
2. Dan vs. pumpkin knife (age 7): small scar on my left hand
Mid-October, I go down the street to visit my friend Nikku. Nikku is a sweet, but pathologically lying Indian kid. Along with him, is another neighborhood kid who would later grow long hair and attempt suicide twice. Nikku and the kid are carving pumpkins unsupervised on his porch. The kid has made decent headway on his, having removed the top and is now working on the face. Nikku, on the other hand, is holding the knife in psycho-killer position and is stabbing the top of it repeatedly. He says this is to make “hair,” but it is clear that he just likes the stabbing.
I decide that, Nikku being two years my junior, it was my responsibility to show him proper pumpkin-cutting procedure. I place my left hand on the pumpkin and cut clockwise with my right. I promptly slash open the skin on top of my thumb knuckle and let out a blood curdly scream. As I run up the street to my house, I hear the neighborhood kid say “Well, he did a good job.”
Medical attention needed: 5 stitches.
3. Dan vs. faucet (age 12): scar under chin
I stepped in the tub to take a shower and fell, slamming my chin on the tub faucet. Nothing more to say, really, aside from the fact that I remember not feeling any pain. I only realized I was cut when I looked in the mirror to see if there was a mark and a stream of blood was pouring down my neck.
Medical attention needed: 2 stitches.
4. Dan vs. table (age 1): scar under left eye
I don’t remember this, obviously, but I’m told my brother pushed me into a glass table. Like the hand wound, this must have been shortly before Halloween, because there’s a picture of me with a gash below my eye wearing drawn-on whiskers and a onesy that reads “Monsters are for loving” on the torso.
Medical attention needed: I don’t know.