The Time I Did Community Service – Summer Camp for the Developmentally Disabled

So there is a camp near my parent’s house for developmentally disabled children and adults. It’s in a beautiful area of Ohio with sprawling fields, well-maintained buildings, and a dedicated staff. They accept volunteers throughout the year, but especially during the busy summer program.

I signed up the summer before 9th grade, and on the first day, we were introduced to our dedicated group of campers. Ages ranged from 6-40 or so, and I was placed with the adult campers. Most everyone wanted the little kids, but I was relieved at first to get the more mature and less rambunctious adults. However, when I was introduced to my two campers, I realized that things would not be so easy after all.

Both had at least 100 pounds and 15 years on me, and one named Peter sadly could not stop drooling. I had to lead him by the hand to each activity since he was frightened of large, open spaces, but his palm was so slick with spit that I could barely hold on. The other man named Mark took a liking to me immediately, and would attempt to kiss me (with tongue) whenever I had my back turned. Neither could really speak, but both had big smiles and seemed very excited about their first day of camp.

Though dwarfed by my charges and possessing zero training, I was still determined to get them both to where they needed to go on time. Peter kept sliding out of my moist grip to run behind trees and cry. Mark kept playing with my long hair, tangling it around his fingers and tying it into knots. Our pace was slow, but we managed to make it to both dance class and arts and crafts without much incident. However, when it was time for swimming, things got dicey.

We volunteers were told to strip the campers ourselves, and slip them into bathing suits. As a 14-year-old girl, I hadn’t yet seen a full naked male body, and was freaked out by this directive. My charges were both upset by my attempts to lift off their clothes, and Peter ran out of the changing area in the yard while Mark began flailing around and screaming. More experienced volunteers glared at me, disappointed in my inability to control my campers. I asked someone to look after Mark while I headed off to go find Peter.

I found him around the back of the building, huddled amongst the trash cans and looking scared. I gripped his slimy fingers and led him back to the changing area, where I saw Mark stark naked and giggling with his arms in the air. He was doing a twisting dance that made his flaccid penis slap rhythmically against his thighs, over and over. Horrified, I dropped Peter’s hand and headed straight to the pool itself, deciding in that moment that someone else could handle their clothing.

Afterwards, I was leading my campers to story time when Mark suddenly lunged for me, grabbed my face, and stuck his tongue down my throat. I tried to shove him away, but he grabbed my hair and ripped a chunk right out of my head. He tried pulling me over to the nearby woods, which were dark and deep, but I broke away and ran. Bleeding and traumatized, other volunteers took over both Peter and Mark, and I stumbled off so I could sit down. My scalp was bleeding copiously and my wrist was aching, but most of my hair appeared to be intact. As I dabbed away the blood, I realized that technically, that had been my first kiss. The thought left me feeling empty.

I did my best to cover the bald spot with the rest of my hair, and then it was time for my mom to pick me up. I told her the story, but as an ER nurse, she seemed less than horrified. She sent me back there two more times before I managed to find a replacement volunteer opportunity. Though it got easier the more I worked, and nobody else tried to attack me, I am clearly not made of the right stuff to work there. I will leave it to people more noble, good, and patient than myself.

The Time I Did Community Service – Planting Carrots

A short time after my reading to the blind fiasco, my mom got a packet in the mail from the United Way.

Inside were phone numbers for various volunteer organizations, though when we began to dial, we discovered the packet was woefully out of date. Most calls went to disconnected numbers, or completely unrelated companies. Many had gone out of business, never to be heard from again. So it was exciting to finally find a human being at the end of the line, even if it sounded like we had woken her up. At 3 pm.

Her “organization” was called something like “Fighting for Animal Welfare,” but it soon became clear that the group had disbanded several years before. But she was old, and had an overrun garden, so would I mind terribly coming over and tending to her carrots?

I argued with my mom that this was not actually community service – this was just helping a single woman. Wasn’t my service supposed to benefit the whole community at large? But I was overruled, and my mom arranged for me to show up that weekend.

I was still too young to drive, so my mom shuttled me over to the opposite end of town, passing by projects and burnt out churches on our way to this lady’s house. “Just be nice and SMILE, for Christ’s sake,” my mom urged, hoping that I wouldn’t run screaming from this opportunity, at least.

She dropped me off in a nondescript driveway, then sped off, promising to be back in two hours or so. Alone, I hesitantly rapped at the woman’s screen door. I heard a violent burst of coughing come from within the dim house, followed by a guttural spitting noise. An ancient-looking woman emerged from the darkness, supporting herself on a cane and covered in at least three layers of clothing.

“Come on in,” she croaked, “and don’t let the cats out.” Each cat was named after a different racial slur, which was charming. I pet “Wetback” uneasily as she settled back into an armchair that had shaped itself to her sagging body.

“I got a pretty overgrown garden back there, so there’s a lot of work to do. You might be wondering about all these clothes I’m wearing.” I nodded warily, eyeing the exit in case she decided to start stripping. “I’ve got all this on since I’m deathly allergic to bees, and they are just EVERYWHERE back there. I think there’s a hive, but I’m not sure…” She trailed off into another prolonged hacking session, which she wrapped up by spitting into a bowl she kept by her armchair. “Do you know what an EpiPen is?”

Indeed I did, if only because my brother is allergic to everything on earth. Essentially, it’s a compact spring-loaded syringe that injects epinephrine straight into a patient suffering from a severe allergic reaction. Remember that scene from Pulp Fiction where Uma Thurman’s character is overdosing, and they stab adrenaline straight into her heart? It’s kind of like that.

She gestured to her thigh with hands that were covered in 3+ pairs of gloves. “This is where you’ll need to aim if I get stung, okay?” And without further ado, she hobbled off to the back door, nudging “Kike” out of the way with her foot. I meekly followed, wondering if one of her neighbors would take me in if I started pounding on their door.

In moments, we had arrived at the garden. It was surrounded by a rusty chainlink fence, and calling it “overgrown” was an understatement. Briars tangled everywhere, choking the tiny rose bush that must have been planted well over a decade ago. She pointed to various plants, giving me their scientific names, then finally shuffled over to the carrot patch. Which looked just like the rest of the garden, and had bees buzzing angrily in the vicinity.

“Yeah, this is where I want to put them. You’ll have to clear out all these other plants, though.”

The other plants in question were thick, thorny vines that had inexplicably been coated in six inches of manure. The stench on a hot summer’s day was overpowering, and I wrinkled my nose with distaste. The woman caught my expression, and warned me not to be so “uppity.” She told me to set to work, but mentioned that she couldn’t spare a pair of gloves. “I need them all to protect myself from the bees.”

She had me set up a lawn chair so she could watch me work, and I began to dig amongst the manure with my bare hands. The thorns pricked my skin every time I grabbed for a briar, but without gloves, I had no choice. Soon my hands were covered in blood and cow shit, and sweat was pouring down my face. The woman began asking me questions about my eating habits. I revealed that I ate meat, and her face became so red and puffy that I thought maybe she had been stung by a bee without me noticing.

“How could you eat poor defenseless animals?!” She wrenched herself from her seat, and huffed back into the house. I kept digging, hoping against hope that somehow two hours had already passed. She came back a few minutes later, and thrust into my face graphic pictures of animals being tortured and butchered. “This is what your diet has caused! All this suffering!” She rambled on like this for the next hour or so, comparing me to Hitler during the Holocaust. I wondered how “Kike” the cat would react to all of this, but he was safe within the confines of the house.

I finally cleared away all the brambles and weeds, and she handed me a tiny packet of carrot seeds. I was to plant them into shallow troughs, then water them. That seemed simple enough, and I was starting to get hopeful that I would soon be out of the hot sun. I dropped the seeds into the furrows, but then realized that there was no hose. Or a watering can. Or even a bucket. How was I supposed to water these?

The woman had an answer. She disappeared outside the chainlink fence for a time, and I began to worry that she was going to make me pee on the carrots or something. But I eventually heard a shout, and the next thing I knew, I was completely soaked with freezing cold water. She had gotten hold of a hose that was attached to the side of the house, then had turned the thing on full blast and aimed the stream so it would go over the 6-foot fence and into the garden. The water had hit right on top of my head, and I could hear her screaming at me to tell her when the water hit the carrots. I directed her over to the patch, and my troughs were instantly overflowing with water, with seeds floating away towards the bees. I yelled at her to stop, but decided to keep the escape of the seeds to myself.

By the time she came back into the garden, the water had soaked into the earth, and everything appeared fine. I was ushered inside, but told not to sit on anything since I was still dripping with water.

She was trying to convince me to play the keyboard during an animal rights parade when I heard a car finally pull into the driveway. I lept over a meowing “Spic” in my eagerness to climb into the car, and that’s how my mom found me. Soaking wet, my hands covered in blood and shit, and an unmistakable look of fear and desperation in my eyes.

She thanked the woman from the rolled-down car window, then screeched off. “What in God’s name happened to you?” I relayed the story, and it was decided that we would no longer use the United Way packet for volunteer opportunities.

The Time I Did Community Service – Reading to the Blind

It’s community service experience week here on Angry Penguins.

At my high school, a certain number of community service hours were required each year in order to graduate. I joined Key Club in order to complete my hours more easily, but I always came up short and had to make up hours over the summer.

My mom attempted to help me in this endeavor by finding service opportunities for me, then forcing me to go. Pretty much every single job I did for community service ended up being horrible. I know writing about how community service sucks makes me a terrible person, but hey – I kind of AM a terrible person.

So without further ado, here’s the first story:

I was 15 or so and went to the Cincinnati Association for the Blind downtown to see if they had any work I could do. I folded fliers for a while and did some data entry, then got a request from a blind elderly woman in a nursing home who wanted someone to read her books.

I love to read, so I jumped at the opportunity. This would be fun! I liked reading aloud and trying to do all the dialogue voices, so I figured this would be entertaining for both me and the lady. But when I got to the nursing home, the woman requested only Danielle Steel novels.

In case you don’t know, Danielle Steel writes cheesy bodice-ripper type of romance novels, and they all feature copious amounts of detailed, gratuitous sex.

However, I didn’t know this at the time, and so I began to read. The woman had no arms, but was a chain smoker, so we sat outside and I changed out her cigarettes every few minutes. I soon reeked of smoke and was coughing as I tried to choke out the words on the page. Whenever she finished a cigarette, she’d bark at me to get another, and she’d spit the filter into the grass before telling me to go grab it for her. Her sightless blue eyes stared off into the distance, and she ground her gums in annoyance as I prepped another cigarette and jammed it between her toothless lips. She drooled as she smoked, the saliva vaguely tobacco-colored.

Within five pages, I realized I was starting to delve into a sex scene. Descriptions of “bulging manhood” and “hot wet thighs” proceeded into some really explicit stuff, and I panicked. There was no way I was going to read this out loud in public amongst the nurses on their rounds. I casually attempted to flip ahead a few pages, but the old woman’s sharp ears picked up on what I was doing.

“Don’t you dare skip past the juicy parts!” she cried, her cloudy eyes shining with lust. Her cigarette dangled from her lower lip, half unbroken ash and half moist paper. I reluctantly flipped back a few pages and painfully read about “engorged members” and “hands slick with fluid.” Smoke billowed out the woman’s nostrils, and she smiled with glee. “Yeah, that’s the stuff,” she mumbled, shifting rhythmically in her wheelchair. A nurse giggled and gave me a smug wink as she walked by. I was overcome with embarrassment, but continued to read until my hour was mercifully up.

I never went back to read to her again.

The Time My Friend Got Robbed

This incident took place during my Summer of Netflix in college.

One of my super brainy friends was doing intense research that summer while I sat on my ass and watched old kung-fu movies. She initially moved into an apartment on the “bad” side of the Delmar Loop, which was an area that had a reputation for crime.

The apartment itself was abysmal, and when I went over to help her move in, I was completely horrified. There was no A/C during a St. Louis summer, and temperatures in the kitchen would frequently rise to over 100 degrees. There was also no hot water, but since you were boiling at all times anyway, the chilly showers were actually a relief.

The kitchen was swarming with flies when I arrived. Half a dozen partially tied garbage bags littered the floor, and trash had spilled out to rot. The flies were having a field day, and the smell was overpowering. My friend stood by, speechless. This was not the condition that had been described when she rented the apartment.

We started by throwing out the garbage bags, then turned our attention to the dishes. They were piled so high that they overflowed out of the sink, and flies were nestled amongst the plates. I tried to drain the sink, but it was clogged with what looked like old vomit. It was either that or ancient vegetable soup that had been partially mashed. The drain catch lurking at the bottom of this cesspit was a lost cause, and we threw it on top of the trash bags. We proceeded to clean this disgusting kitchen with only a fan to protect us against the heat.

I was dripping sweat within moments.

I urged her to move out of this horror house, but the rent was just too cheap for her to let it go. I had a spare bedroom in my apartment, but at twice the price of her sweltering room, she wouldn’t take it.

That is, until someone tried to rob her.

I was relaxing in my ice-cold apartment, A/C on high, when the doorbell started going off. Not just once or twice, but like someone was ringing in fear for her life. I found my friend at the bottom of the stairs, pale and sweaty. She had sprinted all the way from her apartment to mine after discovering that someone had pried open her door. Too afraid to venture into a room where a robber might be lurking, she sensibly ran out of the building. But instead of calling the cops, she senselessly ran to me. What was I supposed to do about this?

I figured that maybe she was overreacting, and to humor her, I armed myself with a hammer before making the trek back to her place. I stopped by another friend’s apartment for reinforcements, and she came along with a baseball bat in tow, making us a team of three. Oh, yeah. This was a great idea.

We cautiously entered her building and made our way up four flights of stairs. Her door definitely looked damaged with the doorknob dangling and paint chips scattered all over the floor. Well, shit, there was actually a robber! I felt really stupid and scared as I clutched my lame hammer, but gamely pushed open the door to see what we were dealing with.

Oddly enough, nothing in the apartment had been disturbed. Whoever had tried to break in had obviously hacked at the door with a crowbar several times, but didn’t actually enter the apartment, or at least didn’t take anything. My guess is that he heard my friend come up to the door, then run away, and he panicked and fled. With great relief, the three of us sank onto the couch and called the cops, like we should have done in the first place.

An officer came over and filed a report, but since nothing had been stolen, there wasn’t much to be done. We just needed to replace the doorknob since the handle had come off in our hands when we entered.

But my friend was having none of this, and moved out of the apartment that very day. She spent the remainder of the summer basking in A/C in a relatively safe apartment that was free of flies.

The Time My Brother Grew a Second Asshole

The entry today is so gross and horrifying that I’ve decided to use a picture of a cute puppy here. If you start feeling ill, just scroll back up and check out this little guy. Aww.

Things were going swimmingly for my brother up until the day his ass started to burn with the fury of a thousand suns.

A loving wife, a beautiful daughter, and a steady, well-paying acting job – all of these things were no match for an anal fistula.

Basically, if you strain too much while pooping, your anus can start to bulge where it’s not supposed to go. Given enough time, this extra pathway from your anus will reach all the way through your muscle until it reaches the outside. Suddenly, one day you wake up with an extra asshole that is inflamed, infected, and never heals since it’s constantly getting shit in it. Literal shit.

So not only do you have a painful second asshole, but because this little tract lacks the muscle control of your original sphincter, it leaks uncontrollably all the time. Every pair of underwear you own will become skid mark city, and there’s absolutely nothing you can do about it. My brother can now fart through two separate holes.

He went to see a surgeon in Las Vegas, and was scheduled for a procedure that involves essentially coring the fistula like an apple. By removing the infected tissue, it’s hoped that the body will actually start to heal itself. The day of the surgery, my brother started weeping copiously at the thought of being violated so thoroughly. He faints at the sight of blood, so the thought of being impaled anally like a puppet was just too much to take. His heart rate spiked so high that a sedative was immediately pumped into his IV, and he remembers no more.

He woke up with his ass packed so tight with gauze that it looked like he’d been reamed by a torpedo. Everything was still numb, and my brother sucked down one of the opiate pills he had been given for pain, so all was well. But later that night began a grueling two-week span of unimaginable pain. Pissing and shitting could only be accomplished while squatting in warm water, which meant essentially bathing in your own waste after crapping in the tub.

When the gauze finally emerged, well, I’ll let my brother explain in his own words:

Turns out, it was a rolled up sheet of something gelatinous, the size of a Kleenex that unfurled into the water like a shit and blood-stained surrender flag. I got out of the tub, walked to the bedroom and passed out on the carpet.

Things weren’t getting any better, so my brother went back to the surgeon, and it was revealed that the doctor was too “conservative,” and didn’t cut the fistula all away. A cauterization (ie. sticking a hot poker up someone’s asshole) was recommended. The area was numbed slightly, then a white-hot probe was jammed up there. The room filled with the stench of burning flesh and shit. My brother begged for more anesthetic, but unfortunately, the doctor was fresh out.

The pain didn’t recede at all, and two weeks later, he was back in the surgeon’s office. This time, the doctor tried to pour acid into his anus. I’m starting to believe this guy wasn’t a doctor at all, but rather some dude with a foreign-body anal fetish. After the acid treatment, my brother was declared “cured” and shoved out into the hallway.

He still has two anuses. Doctors have said he will always have two anuses. This is just his life now.

The Time I Tried to Talk My Friend Out of Madness

This is another title that could apply to many, many times in my life.

But today, it applies to my friend Daniella. She is trying to get fat frozen off her body.

The process is known as “Coolsculpt,” by the company Zeltiq. It claims to permanently destroy fat cells by freezing them, but will leave other tissues unharmed. The website says that fat cells do not typically develop during adulthood, and so destroying the cells will reduce the amount of fat permanently. The entire procedure takes about an hour, and is non-invasive. The idea is that the frozen fat cells die, and their contents are slowly absorbed back into your body. With this methodology, patients shouldn’t lose any weight after completing the procedure, but should instead just see the fat “disappear,” though I would imagine this reabsorbed fat would reappear elsewhere on the body.

The procedure was FDA approved for fat reduction in September 2010, and was previously approved for cooling the skin. Reviews online vacillate between patients raving about the procedure to ones deriding the whole thing as a scam. Anecdotal evidence is rampant, but an online search for peer-reviewed articles has brought up little to nothing. Dr. Oz is a fan of Coolsculpting, though in the words of my doctor/nurse parents, he is “a hack.” Many medical professionals see him as nothing more than a shill who frequently gives inaccurate advice. I’ve been looking at lots of before-and-after photos of patients, and any changes seem to be extremely modest at best. $800+ to pay per fat section is lot for a change only you might notice. Sample sizes of clinical trials are very small, and none track results beyond a year. The long-term effects are currently unknown.

Results don’t appear for 2-4 months, and patients are cautioned to maintain a healthy diet and exercise in the interim. Is any reduction of flab due to the diet, or to the frozen fat cells? Correlation doesn’t necessarily equal causation, and I can’t help but be skeptical about this whole procedure. Though it can only be performed by dermatologists or plastic surgeons, dollar signs can erase the misgivings of many a doctor.

My friend Daniella found that all doctors she called in NYC charged a consultation fee of $250-500 that is not waived, even if you elect to undergo the treatment. She finally found one willing to forgo the fee, but only if she decided to have treatment the very same day.

Daniella has green eyes, brunette hair, and model looks. She is 5’5″, 27 years old, and only 106 pounds, which gives her a BMI of 17.6. This is decidedly below the BMI threshhold of 18.5 for being underweight. Even at my lightest, my BMI was 18.6, and people often commented on how sickly thin I looked.

My point is, Daniella is not fat. In fact, she has no fat to lose, and an attempt to freeze her skin and bone on her “love handles” for $1500 or so is going to be a waste of money. Will it hurt her? Hopefully not, except for some probable bruising and soreness 2-3 weeks after the procedure. But I predict little to no change in her physique, which is good since there is NOTHING TO LOSE anyway!

In my completely non-professional opinion, the jury is still out on Coolsculpting. The technology is still very new, and with few clinical trials, long-term results are far from guaranteed. I think the money for this procedure would be better spent on a gym membership and some healthy cooking lessons. Ah, but that wouldn’t be the American way, now would it? Why work to lose weight when you can laser, freeze, medicate, or vibrate it into submission? Let’s all just get Shake Weights and call it a day.

The Time I Stabbed Myself (Part 2)

(Note: This post is a continuation from this one.)

Though the bleeding had stopped, I still had a gash in my palm an inch wide and about half an inch deep. I didn’t go get stitches since I didn’t have decent insurance at the time, and I held the wound together with butterfly band-aids. My dad located a hand surgeon in NYC that took my shitty insurance, and when I went for a visit, he confirmed what I had suspected. I had cut a nerve, specifically one of the nerves below the 4th finger of my right hand. This resulted in numbness of the right side of my 4th finger and part of my palm. The doctor thought that microscopic surgery would be necessary, and scheduled me for a week later.

Until then, I was told to wear a hard brace on my hand and arm, and to never lower my hand below the level of my heart. The brace itself was, of course, not covered by insurance. And having to hold my hand up in a fist at all times made me look either like an overeager student, or someone professing white power. Neither of which particularly appealed to me, especially since I lived in Harlem at the time.

The day of the surgery finally arrived, and I would have to pay up the copay of $1000 immediately in order to meet my insurance deductible. See kids, this is why you should save up money for these kinds of circumstances. Unfortunately, I had been unemployed for about 8 months, and so was up shit creek without a paddle. Luckily my parents took pity on me, and footed the bill.

My aunt waited patiently in the waiting room while I was taken into the back, and given a shitty white robe to hide my nakedness. However, I also got some sweet socks with built-in traction, which I later stole and still wear. After an awkward time in the pre-surgery waiting room with my hand still high up in the air, I was taken to a bed where I could “make myself comfortable.” I was so jacked up with nerves at this point that I was nearly beside myself, and I didn’t even have a magazine to keep me occupied.

I’m the kind of person that required a Valium prescription before my wisdom tooth extraction, so the thought of a real honest-to-God surgery terrified me. I sat upright in my hospital bed, shaking and feeling very nauseous indeed. Nurses and doctors drifted by, asking me the same few questions over and over again, and drawing symbols on my right arm to indicate where the surgeon should be cutting. This did little to assure me. If the surgeon needed a road map written in Sharpie in order to perform the surgery, I wanted nothing to do with him. I requested to talk with the anesthesiologist, hoping he could give me some comfort in the form of copious drugs. He was happy to oblige.

Before going under the knife, he made sure I was pumped with enough IV Valium to down a horse.

But before that, I had to brave entering the surgical suite itself. It was a smallish room with about half a dozen people huddled around a cross. Yes, a cross. For hand surgery, I would need to lay myself on a cross-shaped table and lie still while nurses strapped me down in four-point restraints. Lovely. The surgical lights were incredibly bright above me, and my eyes rolled around with fear as the straps were tightened. Thus immobilized, the anesthesiologist finally stuck in my Valium IV, and suddenly things weren’t so scary anymore. Lastly, a heavy clamp was applied to my right arm to keep it from jerking around while the surgeon sewed stitches on a nerve thinner than a strand of hair. He would need light, a microscope, and absolute stillness from me to perform this task.

Some stuff to put me to sleep was pumped into my IV, and before I could count to five, I was out. I woke up twice during the procedure, and squeaked at the anesthesiologist to give me more juice. I couldn’t feel a thing since the surgeon had performed a digital block on my right wrist, instantly turning my entire hand numb, but it was still unnerving to wake up during surgery. Both times I was out again almost immediately, then was finally wheeled to the recovery room after all the stitches were complete.

While coming to in the recovery room, I remember being so cold that I thought I would never be warm again. I shivered uncontrollably, and a nurse threw a few blankets on me, which I promptly shivered right off my body. My aunt was there to make sure I was okay, and in my loopy state I started to tell her the real story of my wound. The butterfly knife fiasco was laid bare, but she evidently just thought I was talking nonsense, so my secret was still safe.

I spent the next week at my aunt and uncle’s house recovering since I couldn’t do much of anything with my right arm. The entire thing was encased in a cast, then propped up in a foam “L” shape to keep it from going below the level of my heart (again). If I put my hand below my heart, the swelling could pop the microscopic stitches right off the nerve sheath, so it was imperative that I once again hold my hand above my head for another two weeks. I ate with the massive foam “L”, watched TV with it, and slept with it. It was my constant bulky companion. My aunt and uncle were incredibly kind and accommodating, but I still wanted nothing more than to tear the cast off.

Eventually I headed back to Harlem, cast and “L” in tow, and walked through the streets with my fist hovering right around the level of my eyes. I was stopped more often than I have ever been in my life, with everyone wanting to give me a bit of advice. “Don’t go punching walls, he’s not worth it!” said one woman. Most people assumed that I had broken my hand by punching a wall in anger, and several people told me to either punch something softer, or at least wear a glove or something. Er, thanks?

Later that week, a teenager working the counter at a CVS on Lenox asked me what happened, and I decided that the truth was just too embarrassing. So why not at least make myself sound like a badass? “Oh, I got stabbed,” I said as casually as possible. His eyes widened, and for a moment, I felt almost cool. Well, until I realized I had lied to a random kid just to make myself feel better. Yes, I had been stabbed, but by myself. I slunk home in shame.

It’s been over a year since the surgery, but I still don’t have full feeling in my right-hand ring finger. The right side is still mostly numb, but I can live with it. Though wearing a ring there feels really bizarre, like I’ve just hit my funny bone or something, so, er, just don’t ask me to get engaged, okay?

The Time I Stabbed Myself (Part 1)

I wish this had happened longer ago than just a year. It’s such a story of stupidity that it’s difficult to grasp that I was 26 rather than 16.

I was in Las Vegas visiting my brother last summer. He was acting in one of the shows on the Strip, and we hung out at his house and generally had a grand old time. I’d tag along to the Strip while he performed in his show, wandering around from casino to casino, and playing penny slots because I am the cheapest being on Earth.

I actually had a strategy for maximizing my free drinks at the casinos. At the penny slots, only pay one cent at a time, but sit next to someone who is a chain smoker. 99% of the time, that smoker is also going to be a heavy drinker who tips the cocktail waitresses well. Park yourself next to them, and if you can ignore the clouds of smoke, you’ll see waitresses practically fall over themselves to serve them (and by extension, YOU). Reeking of smoke, but happily drunk for only pennies, I’d while away the hours. My brother would then pick my drunk ass up and drive me home. Good times!

During this painfully hot August trip to Vegas, we saw billboards advertising the LAS VEGAS GUNSHOW, in all caps. At first we joked about it, wondering the types of people who would attend such a thing. But after I shot an uzi at a store near the Strip (all you need is a driver’s license!), I started getting curious. I had never been to a gun show before – would we be the only liberals present? Would somebody start shooting? The possibilities were endless! We decided to go check it out during my final weekend in Vegas.

Upon handing over $10 at the door, we entered the show and marveled. Guns were absolutely everywhere, along with survival gear and scantily clad women who acted as “booth babes” for the sparsely attended show. One tried to demonstrate the “power” of a magnetic balancing bracelet on me – the “before” example had her practically knocking me over, while the “after” one, with the bracelet, had her barely touching me. I called her out on her chicanery, and she asked me to leave the booth.

I picked up some reusable chemical hand warmers for the New York winter ahead, and also browsed the powdered meals which took up the entire rear of the show. These were emergency rations for the apocalypse, and they were handing out samples. Hungry and intrigued, I took a taste, and let me tell you, I’d rather die in a nuclear winter than eat that shit again. Once again, I was shooed from the booth.

Exiled from approximately half the show, I headed on to the main event, which were the guns and knives. Every table tried to hand me a pink handgun, “For the little lady,” each burly man behind the counter said with a wink. Ugh. I tried sighting some of the larger revolvers, but who was I kidding? At 5 foot nothing and 95 pounds, the recoil alone would knock me on my ass. But I refused to touch anything pink with HEARTS (yes, there was a gun like this), so I also looked at the tiny pistols designed to carry in your purse. Tiny enough to be shot by a child, I found them pretty unnerving. A man at a table full of shotguns recommended that I just use a flashlight to scare a robber instead. Actually shooting a shotgun at close range indoors would destroy much of the room, and he stressed that because of the difficulty of aiming the damn thing, shotguns were mostly just to scare people anyway.

After it was all done, I was a little disappointed to come away with nothing but hand warmers, and so lingered by the knife cabinet. Inside were about a dozen varieties of butterfly knife for prices ranging from $15 to over $100. I had seen my brother do flipping tricks with a similar knife years ago, and wanted to learn for myself. Cheap as I was, I felt a little ridiculous getting the $15 knife, so I sprung for a $20 model – the second cheapest in the case. Excited to try out my new toy, we headed home.

My brother had to work at the theater all day since he had both a matinee and an evening performance, so I decided to stay home and learn my way around this new knife. Alone. I looked up some videos of flipping tricks on YouTube, and attempted to follow the tutorials closely. I began very slow and cautious, but wasn’t too worried since the knife wasn’t particularly sharp. Lord knows how long it had been lying in that cabinet at the show, but it was dull and not particularly clean.

I was doing pretty well for a while, when I decided to try and speed things up, and I got overconfident. While spinning the blade around my hand, I miscalculated and lost my grip on the knife. It spun around in the air, then planted itself tip-first straight into my palm. The edge might had been dull, but the tip was plenty sharp enough to cut through my flesh like butter.

I gave a gasp of pain as the bloody knife clattered to the floor, then nearly passed out. The pain was incredibly intense, and I immediately started cursing until I ran out of words. I knew I was in deep shit since my ring finger and a portion of my palm had gone instantly numb. I grabbed a paper towel, then collapsed onto a nearby couch, trying to fight off the blackness creeping around the edges of my vision. I held my hand above my head, applying as much pressure as I could while I watched the towel turn red at an alarming rate.

Freaked out beyond all reason, I frantically called my brother, but he was on stage and nowhere near his cell phone. I considered calling 911, but chickened out when I thought of the cost of an ambulance. Resigning myself to the inevitable, I called my parents. With a doctor and an ER nurse at my disposal, I figured if anyone would know what to do, it would be them.

“So, uh, hi,” I began, my voice high-pitched and breathless. I was attempting to wedge the cell phone between my face and my shoulder while holding my throbbing hand a foot above my head. “So, uh, I kind of maybe stabbed myself. And I can’t feel part of my hand.” My parents were, understandably, ALARMED. They first asked HOW it had happened, and I panicked. I didn’t want to tell the truth. Who wants to hear that their child bought a knife at a sketchy gun show in the desert, then STABBED herself with it? I hastily concocted a story about about a cooking accident, which my parents accepted without much scrutiny since I was, you know, bleeding to death.

My mom told me to wash out the wound, which I attempted to do for about half a second before I thought I would faint. “Oh, yeah,” she said. “In the hospital, we usually have to hold people down for that part. You probably have an exposed nerve in your hand.” Indeed I did, as I would later find out.

But the bleeding eventually stopped, my brother came home after his day at the theater, and we headed to the nearest pharmacy to get myself a tetanus shot. Without knowing where that blade had come from, I was taking no chances with lockjaw. My dad even called in an antibiotic for me to start taking right away.

As for what happened next, I will leave that for later. Tune in tomorrow for the exciting conclusion of “Playing With Knives Is a Terrible Fucking Idea!”

(Click here to read Part 2 of the stabbing saga!)

The Time My Cat Melted

When I was two years old, my parents got a cat named Rosie.

Now, my brother is deathly allergic to cats, and the story goes that my mom got this cat out of spite. My brother had left town to go live with his dad in Florida for a while. My mom, angry that her son had left, decided to get a cat to indicate that he wasn’t necessarily welcome back into the house. I should mention that this story has been disputed by the involved parties.

Regardless of the reason for the cat, the point is we had him. He lived to be the ripe old age of 18, and was a pain in the ass for every one of those years. He was the most ill-natured, evil cat I’ve ever seen. He wouldn’t allow anyone to touch him, and if you risked it anyway, you’d get a scratch or a bite for your troubles. He actually had to be put on kitty Valium since he was so aggressive. My brother used to throw him into the pool on a yearly basis (called the “Annual Cat Toss”) in a horrible type of protest. I was petrified of Rosie, and avoided him at all costs. I used to bribe him with tuna and milk, whispering promises that if he left me alone, more treats would follow. It was a form of feline protection money.

One day I woke up to find Rosie asleep on my chest. Terrified, I didn’t move for over an hour, afraid that if I woke him up, he’d claw off my face. He also had an uncanny ability to seemingly understand English. He always knew if you were talking about him, and would meow his displeasure. I was once in charge of putting him onto the screened-in porch for the night when my parents were away. He always hated being put onto the porch, and would run, yowl, scratch, and bite to avoid it. Fearful for my life, I begged him in English to please just obey me this once. I’d give him cream the next day, if only he would do me this favor. He glared at me, swished his tail, then walked calmly onto the porch and sat down. I gave him the promised cream the next morning.

All in all, we as a family merely tolerated this cat for 18 years. He got into fights with other cats regularly, and my parents would dutifully shuttle him to the vet, where he’d get a tiny IV in his little paw. When he developed a thyroid problem, my dad shelled out for surgery so that he could continue to live and terrorize us. This cat acquired out of spite soon seemed to be staying alive simply out of spite. No matter how extensive his health issues, he just kept right on truckin’.

He eventually grew thin and gaunt, and stopped eating. My parents sensed the end was near, and considered taking him to the vet to be put down, but were put off by the cost of getting an emergency euthanization over a holiday weekend. Perhaps hopeful that he might pull through, they decided to wait it out.

Over the course of the next 48 hours, Rosie grew increasingly worse. His non-stop yowling was ear-splitting, and he was eventually carried out onto the porch to rest on a bed there. He didn’t improve, and eventually began to, well, leak.

My parents explained that he was going into multi-organ failure, and all these vital juices were beginning to flow out his eyes, ears, mouth, and nose. These fluids drip-dripped into a steadily growing puddle on the floor, and I was urged “not to look.” But look I did, and I realized that Rosie had escaped the bed and was lying on the brick floor of the porch, looking for all the world like a cat-skin rug. He had lost so much water that his flesh and fur had essentially melted off his body and spread across the floor, but he was still alive and mewing occasionally. Horrified, I fled to my room. Though I certainly had no love for this cat, no person or animal deserved this.

My mom was getting more and more depressed about the situation, and decided to give Rosie one last hug of comfort. Despite all his past transgressions, she couldn’t deny any animal experiencing such suffering. She gently scooped him up and rocked him slowly back and forth. With the last of his strength, Rosie tottered to his feet, lept out of my mom’s arms, attempted to bite her one last time, then finally collapsed.

The horror was over.

The Time My Mom Bought a Cleaver With My Dad’s Name On It

My dad went through a rather nasty divorce about 35 years ago.

I don’t know much about my dad’s first wife since I’ve never met her, and not talking about her seems to be an unspoken rule in my parents’ house.

I didn’t even know my dad had been previously married until I was around 13 years old, and discovered the inscription my paternal grandmother had written on a huge Random House dictionary we kept in the kitchen. I had never read the inscription before, but knew that it had been a wedding gift. I wasn’t until I realized that the happy couple mentioned did NOT include my mom that I got suspicious. I asked about it while setting the table for dinner, and there was suddenly a tense silence in the kitchen. “That was your dad’s first wife,” my mom muttered, and the subject was dropped, despite the 1000 questions I had. I later discovered that there was a whole lot more to this story than met the eye, but I think that’s for another blog post (assuming I can get my parents’ permission to write about it).

Anyway, during the divorce proceedings, my parents knew each other. Apparently, wife #1 was taking EVERYTHING in the house. None of this splitting down the middle business – she wanted the lot. Now, my dad is a pretty mild-mannered sort. While growing up, if he ever yelled at me, I’d retreat to my room to cry and mope. Within 15 minutes though, he would always come to my room and apologize. I had usually forgotten all about it by then and would be busy playing with my toys, but my dad would have spent 15 minutes wracked with guilt. He’d break down every time, which meant my mom ended up being the far more effective disciplinarian. No one can hold a grudge like my mom, and she would sooner die than back down in an argument.

This meek nature of my dad’s meant that he sat passively by while wife #1 stripped the house clean. My mom felt sorry for my dad, so decided to buy him a present that would have his name on it. Surely, wife #1 wouldn’t stoop so far as to steal something labeled so clearly with his name.

But I had to ask, why a CLEAVER? It’s a pretty ominous gift to give someone in the middle of a vicious divorce. It would certainly make policework easier after a gruesome murder. “Ah, I think I know who the culprit is. His name is right on the knife!” My mom claims it was simply because she and my dad enjoyed cooking together, and she wanted to give him a heavy knife that he could use to easily cut up whole chickens. She also conceded that she secretly hoped he might chop something (or rather someone) up a bit, but knew he was far too gentle for that.

Sure enough, that cleaver remains one of the only things in our house from my dad’s first marriage. Wife #1 didn’t take it, and my mom now uses it to savage chickens on a regular basis. But if you look closely at the blade, you’ll see written in fine, curly cursive script: “Greg’s Cleaver.”