#thatreallyhappened

or, “12-Year-Old John is a raging idiot”

Relax, this is not depressing or confessing or emotionally undressing. There’s no trigger warning needed unless you’re triggered by a chain of stupid that 35 years later, still beggars my imagination…

…and I was the one doing it.

When I was 12, my best friend Bryan moved to Gloucester to live with his mom. This was maybe the first time that divorce really intruded into my life. Bryan and I were inseparable. I’d ride my bike to his house, he’d ride his bike to mine, (this was the late 1970s, you could do this without calendaring, vetting, helmets, or parents really even knowing what was going on beyond the little maniacs being out of the house for hours and thank you Jesus for bicycles.)

I was probably as depressed as if he’d died. Because there was no internet. Long Distance was hideously expensive, and certainly something not wasted on a pre-teen. Letters? Right, you haven’t seen my handwriting. It’s better now. Gloucester was effectively the moon. So, the idea was hatched that I would fly up to Boston the day after Xmas, and spend a week or so at Bryan’s mom’s house.

First — Dear Bryan’s mom: I am so, so, sorry. You had no clue what was about to happen.

Now, there is an important fact here: I was 12, and had lived in Miami since I was 3. I had no clue, none, about snow, or what have you. This is important.

So I get up there, and we’re hanging out, and one bright day, we decide that hey, there is snow, and there is a hill just covered with it, and we have sleds. Not the classic wood ones with rails, but the ones that look more like plastic sheets with grooves cut into them.

The hill in question was maybe…ten feet high? Sure, that works. (it was 35 years ago, and I’m lucky I remember that day. Allow for estimation in some cases.) At the bottom of the hill was a “fire barn”, or what everyone else calls a “fire station”. It was a typical fire station. Made of things like bricks and wood. Hard things. Things That You Should Not Run Into.

So to sled down and not go “splat”, (this annoyed parents and firefighters both. We were probably more sanguine about it than was healthy), you’d sled down, and then jog over to the right about…oh, 3–4 feet, and end your run about 10 yards from the road. Perfectly safe, because of course, we turned well before the wall. Safety first.

If you believe that last part…well just bless your heart honey. This was the days when Evel Knievel was the hero of little kids everywhere. We held out to the very last second to turn. Because yeah, boys. Boys, as it turns out, are dummmmmmmb. I highly recommend having girls. They do not seem to have the dumb. Boys have the dumb, boys are the dumb.

Now, again, I have never sledded before in my life.

But I start out going feet first. That’s cool, I can steer well enough and slowly build up confidence until I too am turning juuuuust before I get to the building. That is made of bricks and wood, and other hard things. Probably steel. Yes, definitely. There is steel in there as well.

But then I notice something. Bryan and the other kids are going down the hill headfirst. Whereas I am still going down the hill feet-first.

Suddenly, I am the last kid with training wheels on his bike, and if you know anything about kids, that is just not acceptable. So now I will remove the training wheels, I will ride on the edge, I too will risk it all…

I will go down the hill headfirst.

So I do, and it starts out okay. I get to where I should start turning, I lean to one side to turn and nothing.

All I am doing is going down the hill on my right side. I am also evidently going a lot faster than I should be. Okay, okay, John, think fast, thinkHAND! Put your right hand in the snow and the increased drag will

THOOM

Head, meet firehouse. Firehouse, meet head.

I knocked myself out. Stone cold unconscious, laying in the snow. Not moving. Bryan said they thought I was dead at first. Because that’s how 12 year olds think.

Now, you think, from watching TV that when knocked unconscious, it’s like being comatose. You don’t think anything until you come to. Well, that may be regularly true, it may even be usually true, but it is not always true. I was having this messed-up dream about laying in the living room of Bryan’s Girlfriend’s house, (yes, capitalized. There was something odd about this. Yvonne was great, but they had a thing going that I was not sure about. Also, she had a mean left hook. Mouth off to Yvonne, you were bleeding.) This made sense because I’m face-down in the snow.

I come to, push myself up and am both very glad to be breathing and in more goddamned pain than I thought possible. I was, to be blunt, bawling. My head hurt, my skull hurt, my hair hurt.

At this point, there are grownups and firefighters, and I learned that when you hit yourself in the head with a building so hard that you knock yourself out, You Must Go To The Hospital. As I’m getting put in the stretcher, I hear one of the kids in our group say “Hah-ha, he’s crying, what a little girl” and Bryan say “Shut the fuck up! Lemme slam your head into a building and watch you cry.”

I probably would have set myself on fire for Bryan at that moment, because man, he defended me crying.

So the usual hospital stuff. I remember the doc giving Bryan’s mom the normal concussion instructions, what behaviors she should look out for, (of course, Bryan and I immediately start mimicking those behaviors. Again, Bryan’s mom, I AM SO SORRY!) What he should have said was “Look, clearly you are saddled with two little idiots. So keep them inside. You should probably duct tape them to the wall.”

We get back to Gloucester, and giving in to the understandable impulse to get away from these little nit-wits, Bryan’s mom, (PAT! Just remembered her name was Pat!), Pat lets us go play outside. It’s after dark, and Bryan’s other friend David joins us. Now, I’d like to say that David was the smart one. That would be a lie. None of use were smart. This may explain why Yvonne was never that thrilled to hang out with us. She was like Feynman compared to us. Well, okay, Yvonne’s dog would have been Feynman compared to us. We were the three idiots of Cape Ann, and we were on a mission from…whomever the god of stupid is.

Now, by Bryan’s house is a wee bay. Not uncommon for that area. And as this is almost January, it is iced up rather well. But we are not dumb! (HAH) We know that if you are not careful, you can fall through the ice. That is bad. That is a thing you die from. (Not hitting your head with a building. THAT never occurred to us. But this danger we know about.) So first, we’re going to be all Alpine about it, (we couldn’t even spell Switzerland, what the hell did we know about Alpine?) We’ll get some poles and use them to probe the ice, and in that way, We Will Be Safe.

But wait!

Poles aren’t that long. What if we find a week spot in the ice. Then we’re like 4' away from it, and we’re screwed. So we decided to not go walking on the ice.

HAAAAAAHAAHAHAHAHAAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAAAAAA

Bless your heart if you believed that.

No, no, we came up with a better idea.

We’d each carry a good-sized chunk of ice, and to test the ice in front of us, we’d just heave the chunk at it. If it went through, we’re still like 10–20 yards away from it, (we clearly overestimated our throwing abilities), and in that way, We Will Be Safe.

You already know what’s being set up.

We’re walking along, well, sort of, carrying big blocks of ice, (because why would we use ice we could easily carry? Pfft. Besides, Bryan had been the beneficiary of an early visit from the Puberty Fairy, and even though he was 8"+ taller than David or I, by god we were NOT GOING TO CARRY A SMALLER CHUNK OF ICE! HONOR WAS AT STAKE!)

holy shit was I ever stupid. I mean it. I have told this story over and over, and I am still amazed at how fucking stupid I was. The fact I am alive is damned near proof of God.

Suddenly, SHOCKER!, I start to slip and fall. Now, I’m not stupid, (HAH! HAH!) I know I’m carrying a big piece of ice, and that will suck if it lands on me. So I heave it off to the side.

Your mom heaved it off to the side.

I however managed to somehow fling that bastard up high enough that I had time to fall down and sit up before it…hit me in the fucking head. Split right in two. Bryan said that it was kind of perfect. Hit my head dead-center, and then crack, two pieces fall off.

In case you’re keeping count, that is, in the space of one day, twice I have now hit my goddamned head with something.

We don’t tell Pat, because we’re pretty sure she’ll put me in a suitcase and ship me back to Miami. Or use me for fishing bait. Either way, Grownups Will Not Be Told.

David goes home, Bryan and I go back to his house, and I go upstairs to take a leak. And make sure I’m not bleeding. Pat would have noticed bleeding. Grownups always notice bleeding. So I’m walking back down the stairs and…

…

…

…

You know how, in some houses, in the stairwell, the ceiling comes straight down, then goes off flat, so you have a corner? And if it’s an older house, that corner is a little low, so you kind of have to duck?

Whump

That, by the way, is now the third time I have hit my head on something hard, and the second time I have hit my head with a goddamned building. In one day. Not even a whole day. Probably in less than 15 hours.

I come downstairs holding my head, saying “Owwww” as quietly as I can and Bryan just looks at me, his best friend who is, to be truthful, an idiot and says, “John, I swear to god, if you hit your head one more time, I’m making you wear a helmet.”

To this day, I have a flat spot on my skull from the first building.

And I can say things like “I have a flat spot on my skull from the first building.”

Like I said, I think I was trying to kill myself through sheer force of unrelenting stupidity.