With the Bike Over the Wall

I’m accident prone. I think it started with the fondue-fork accident when I was about 10. We were having meat cubes in boiling oil, as a family. All the others had two or more pieces on their thin, sharp forks. I wanted more, too. So I cupped two raw meat cubes in the palm of my hand, and jabbed the fork straight through, such that it became stuck perpendicularly in my hand. I just looked at it as all the blood drained out of my head. My dad calmly yanked it out, but I continued to stare — transfixed by how stupid and greedy I had been.

Car accidents, I’ve had a few. People say I’m not the world’s greatest driver, and I guess they’re right. But I know and follow traffic rules. And stuff like that. I’ve just had some bad luck.

OVER THE WALL ON A BIKE A 26-year-old student who drove his bicycle over the lawn of the Colombi Park in the direction of Railroad St. incurred a head injury on Thursday morning about 2 a.m. The man, who wasn’t wearing a helmet, apparently didn’t see, because it was dark, that there is a roughly one-meter-high wall that divides the Colombi Park and Railroad St. The student crashed on the sidewalk and was taken to the hospital with serious injuries.

Then a few years back I slipped and fell down the wooden spiral staircase from the third story of the house down to the second. As I was in the seated position, I broke the fall skidding with my right leg sticking straight out, which then struck the wall on the second-floor landing. God, it hurt.

It was 10 years ago this week that I had the Big One, the one that made the newspaper. I was in Germany. Taking a late-night bicycle ride, I wanted to cut it short by passing through a park. Well, the second-hand bike I bought from a Canadian had no back brakes, which is fine if you’re going a modest speed along the road. But the path along which I was tooling suddenly ended, and grass began. It was on a hill leading down to a drop-off to the street. Momentum gaining, I pumped the one functional brake frantically, then I “caught air” and it was like that last scene in E.T. — the boy on the bike flying away into the sky. I remember the last thought I had was “Can I turn around?”

The rest is a blur punctuated by a few moments of lucidity. I know some people found me, because although I had blacked out in mid-air, I came to for a second on the ground and saw someone standing over me crying (there was a lot of blood — head injuries, you know) and saying, in German, “Don’t move, little one!” I guess they couldn’t tell how old I was because of the blood.

Then I came to once more in the silent ambulance (in Germany, they don’t want to wake people up with sirens at night) and once more on the operating table.

The moment of truth came the next day, when I woke up and asked what had happened to me and the German doctor smilingly told me: “You know how the Indians used to do this [makes scalping motion] in America? That’s what happened to you!”

A couple of days later in the hospital, when I finally stood up and went over to the bathroom mirror, I was shocked at my disfigurement. They had shaved only the left half of my hair off. I had Frankenstein stitches across half my head, from above my left ear in an arc up and over to the middle of my left eyebrow, with big, sloppy Xs on my scalp and smaller, more delicate Xs in blue plastic thread down my forehead, since that would be the visible part.

It’s strange: I cared less about my own vanity, and more about what my loved ones, especially my parents, would think of me. For someone who hasn’t had an unchosen body alteration, it’s tough to understand, but you feel like the precious gift your parents gave you has been spoiled. You feel a kind of shame.

So you console yourself with thoughts of what would have been worse. Let me tell you, when I was told what the doctors surmised had happened to me on my trip through space and air on the bike, I thanked God that I hadn’t broken my back, or been blinded or just plain old bled to death. I’m glad I blacked out.

(They said that the injuries to my head and back were all “separate events,” meaning I hit the ground at least twice and probably three times, bouncing again and again from the sidewalk like a rag doll in a paint mixing machine.)

People around me in the months after the accident said things like, “Hey, don’t be sad; after all, you’re not a real man until you have a scar!” or “How distinguished looking! Are you a fencer?” A lot of the Germans would just point and say “What happened to your face?” Many people wanted to make me “feel better” by showing me their “scars,” which usually were about the size of a pinprick. Uh, my face was permanently disfigured? Do you really want to play the scar-comparison game? I’m a scar snob now.

You’ll be an extraterrestrial soon enough, but in the meantime be as careful as you can, and remember, when the universe decides to mess you up, there’s not much you can do about it.