The Clumsy Gene – Part 2

When I practiced martial arts (which I did for 25 years) and yoga (which I did for about 7 years) I was focused, intent, and lost in the moment.  In fact yoga felt like slow-motion martial arts. Outside of these things, I am the second-clumsiest person I have ever seen.  I bang into doorways, stub my toes, and find ingenious, unique, Rube Goldbergesque ways to engineer personal injury. You could follow me around for a couple of days and have material for three more Final Destination movies.

I’ve never understood it. I’m not uncoordinated. I have reflexes, if I may say so, like a cat hockey goalie on speed. But let me spend an hour in your house (or, hell, my house) and you’ll want to redecorate in bubblewrap.

The clumsiest person I have ever met is my mother.  She could trip over a hole on an ice skating rink. She’d find a way to cut herself in a Nerf factory.  I used to wonder how she lived long enough to have children, then wonder if I got my clumsiness from her. This made me wonder if clumsiness could be hereditary, and how that could possibly be. I mean, how can you naturally select for traits that seem unlikely to let an organism live long enough to reproduce?  It’s like saying there’s a suicide gene. Scuse me?

One thing I have not inherited from my mother is a tendency to panic in emergencies.  If she cuts herself she runs around flapping the bleeding appendage and spraying blood everywhere and yelling “Somebody! Somebody!”  She does the funky chicken and her ears go flat to her head and she yells incoherently.

I once ran over my foot with a lawnmower. I was pull-starting it and the knot caught and the mower lifted just as the engine started and it landed on my foot.  I looked down at my shredded shoe and shut off the lawnmower and walked into the house and into the bathroom and took off my shoe and my sock and put my foot in the bathtub and ran water, and only then did I realize I’d only cut off the top of my shoe.  I’ve got a hundred of these stories. I used to take a certain warped pride that I remain calm in emergencies, which is good when you’re someone who tends to create emergencies.

Then I met Maureen.  At the time she’d been an ICU nurse for about 13 years.  Let me tell you right now that it sucks to go out with an ICU nurse. You can’t come home and bitch about your day.  When we were going out I was working at an ad agency.  I’d come home and say, “I got yelled at today for correcting an ad headline. How was your day”  And she’d say, “Well, I had a cardiac patient break his straps and tear out his IVs and code on me.  I had to crack his chest while his tubes bled everywhere.”  However bad your day is, your ICU nurse wins.

Being married to an ICU nurse means that when you, as a carrier of the Clumsy Gene, inevitably gack yourself on something, you will receive rapid expert medical attention. What it doesn’t mean is that you’ll get an ounce of sympathy. They just ain’t wired like that.

What all this has to do with writing

“A writer in a canoe in the rain,” someone once said (or more likely wrote), “should be able to write about what it’s like to be on the Titanic.” Man, do I relate to that. Someone else wrote (about journalism) that “all life is copy.”  I relate to that, too.

Long ago when I lived in Gainesville, Florida, I was helping my friend Kerry move to a new place.  It was a crazyhot day and I pulled a sixpack of Pepsis from the back seat of my car. This was back when Pepsis came in tall 16-oz glass bottles in thin cardboard carry cases.  I pick up the case, two bottles hit, one of them explodes, and a glass sliver flies off to open up an artery in my calf.  I look down and it’s spurt spurt spurt. I clamp it and I yell out I need a tourniquet. (Which I didn’t. Being calm doesn’t mean being right.) We clamp the wound and figure out what to do. I’ve just moved to Gainesville and I work graveyard at a convenience store and I have no money and no insurance. Kerry works at a chem-testing lab. He says, fuggit, let’s go see Randall.

Randall is Kerry’s boss. Randall works with lab rats. Randall can sew my dumb ass up.

Randall looks at the wound and says “Hold on” (his tone exactly the tone Maureen used 26 years later).  He comes back with a bottle of brandy, a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a spool of thread, and a suturing needle. He tells me, look, you don’t have a lot of nerves in your leg, really.  His way of reassuring me is to take the needle and shove it through the back of his hand.  “See?” he says.  “If I hit a nerve just tell me and I’ll move the needle.”  He asks me if I want a shot of brandy.

Hellno. I want two shots of brandy. I drink ’em double plus quick too.  Kerry holds my hand and Randall kneels before me and dips the thread in hydrogen peroxide and sews up my wound. To this day I remember being fascinated by the thick layer of skin yielding to the layer of fat above the artery. On time it hurt and I said so and Randall moved the needle a little and it didn’t hurt. But I remember that the feeling of the thread sliding through the skin made me want to fwow up.

When we’re done Randall gives me some antibiotics and says, The stitches’ll probably get infected. If they turn bright red take these.

I won’t go into what it feels like to recover from an artery-deep cut with homemade stitches. Or to go back to Tae Kwon Do practice waaaay before it’s healed.

The wound turns bright red around the stitches.  I take the antibiotics. The infection goes away.  Some time later it’s time to remove the stitches.  I sterilize an Xacto knife with alcool and cut them and pull them out with tweezers. One stitch is stubborn and I apply some pressure and the Xacto knife pops through and slices into my thumb.  I look at it bleeding and think, No way. No goddamn way. I am not going to anyone about this.

Eventually it healed. To this day I can’t feel anything from the top of my right shin down to across my right instep. That is, I can feel pressure but not much more. If I hit the wound itself I get pins & needles. The nerves never really reconnected.

Almost all of this incident got transmuted into my novel The Architect of Sleep. Bentley gashes a leg and gets an infection and is delirious and bedridden. It’s important to the plot so he can have time to learn about the culture he finds himself immersed in. But the details came straight out of my life.

If you’re a writer, when something horrible happens, something just as horrible inside you stands aloof recording and reporting and thinking, Oh, I can use this. You gash yourself and something in your brain hits “record.”  Your father has a stroke and part of you becomes a journalist. It sucks — and it’s also necessary. All people hurt themselves. All fathers die. Capture that. Find the way of looking at it no one else has seen. Else you have no business being in this business.  Else what you say rings false. Especially in fantasy and science fiction, where you have to make the reader believe impossible things. The truth of details and feelings like these acts as an anchor for the rest.