Cut Hand

[This essay appeared in a little magazine, The Truth About the Fact, a couple of years ago.-JK]

So here I am, hooked like a fish, hanging from a garage door track about seven feet in the air, and the thing is, it’s sort of funny. Later, after the ER and the stitches and much reliving of the calamity in a cozy Vikoden haze, I will wonder about this: how is it that, when the cable snaps and the ladder goes, the first thing that escapes me is a wheezy little guffaw, and I feel myself grinning like a monkey?

 But after all it makes good sense. One year I taught a course in Laughter and Comedy, a successful course, great fun for me and the students, and the Elements of the Comic are still neatly arranged in my memory. Dread, reprieve, relief, sudden enlightenment. A lightning swift emotional retreat, brought on by the impossible combination of foreknowledge and surprise.

So of course it’s funny. I have been over at my daughter’s house, bringing in the mail while she and her husband and the kids are on vacation, and I decide to have a look at the garage door that has been giving them trouble. In one kind of comedy, my age and good intentions would establish me as one of those salt-of-the-earth characters who are spared the needle of satire. But this sketch is more hard-edged; I am cast as the clown.

Going into the garage, I spot the problem in about ten seconds: mangled spring up above the left-hand track, causing the door to ascend unevenly, hence to stick. After all I have some experience in these matters, having once lived for years with a poorly installed door that required much tinkering. I pull on the rope handle to disengage Christy’s door from the electric opener, then carefully lift the thing as far as it will go, high up overhead. Then I get Brent’s eight-foot ladder and climb up outside the track for a look. It takes only a moment to unhook the bad spring, a big heavy thing, one of two that hold the door up on this side. Bent and splayed, it looks like Godzilla has been playing with it: a wonder that it worked at all. I drop it down to the garage floor from the ladder.

But now —hello!—it looks like there is a second problem. The main cable, the one that runs through the pulley held by the springs and attaches down at the foot of the door, is not properly anchored up here at the top. A clumsy knot, of all things, attaches it to an S-link that is hooked into a bracket that is not even bolted to anything, but just tied to a support with the extra cable. The knot has let some cable pay back through the S-link, probably doing as much as the bad spring to unbalance the door. Well, well, well, I will certainly have to correct all this, as soon as I get back from the store with a new spring. But since I am up here anyway, I will go ahead and unhook the cable from the bracket.

Bergson, in his book Laughter, makes much of the clown’s loss of volition, his abrupt conversion from agent to object. I grip the S-link firmly and unhook it. Then things happen with the clickety-click, breakneck, a-b-c inevitability of slapstick. Spring pulls back on the cable I have just freed. Door edges forward, reaches the curved part of the track, then roars on down, very fast because I have removed one of the two springs that should slow it on this side. Cable jerks savagely in my hand, hooks me with the S-link, yanks me sideways like a doll. Ladder goes flying.

Calamity, in short. But as always in comedy there is good news too, the final catastrophe turned aside. Falling, I manage to catch the track under both arms and, just barely, hang on, Harold Lloyd on a ledge, Chevy Chase, Wile E. Coyote. That is a big part of what has me giggling: pure golden relief, combined with belated, breathtaking understanding of my mistake. You moron. Also there is the image of my legs as they must look to a detached observer, bereft, thrashing in the air. It’s said that Hitler, after crushing the Valkyrie conspiracy, had the hangings filmed and watched them for hours, shouting with glee. I can believe it, because this midair dance is just somehow unspeakably silly. But the salient fact, the huge one, is that I have escaped falling all the way to the floor. Had I plunged any farther the cable, which has driven the S-link deep (oh yes, deep) into the meaty part of my palm, would have yanked up short. I might now be lying on the floor, looking back up at a dancing cable ending in a hook baited with a big chunk of my hand. That this has not happened is enough to make any man giggle.

But it still might happen if I do not get my hand free. I can’t hold myself this way for long. Swinging my right leg back as far as I can, I feel something back there — probably the edge of my son in law’s big plastic waste wheeler, there against the wall in his neat garage. I swim doubtfully in the air a moment, and my right foot gets a tenuous purchase, then my left. Also it seems that the collar of my shirt has been wound up into the pulley somehow and is helping to hold me: a drunk in the hands of a bouncer, a kitty in Mama cat’s jaws.

So now, stretched out perilously, I hunch up over the metal track and work my left hand over to my right. A big breath here. I have fished a few times, but always hated the process of extracting the hook: the force with which you must yank, the way the barb tears the papery mouth flesh. At least this one will have no barb. My fingers find the S-link and I pull. For an instant black spots are whizzing through the air of the closed garage, as if I had wakened a family of bats. No, this is not going to happen. No indeed. The thing is, the remaining spring still keeps tension on the cable, so I can’t pull the link far enough to get it out of the hole it has made for itself. Then it punishes the attempt by snapping back into the wound.

My next idea is to call my wife. She is at least fifteen minutes from here, but I have a childish faith that she will know what to do, if only I can find words for my predicament. Perhaps she will know Christy’s neighbors’ names, perhaps she can call them. At the least I will have a funny story to tell her. Part of the weirdness of all this, I begin to see, has to do with shock and adrenaline: also no doubt the reason the pain is no worse.

I shift my weight over onto my right arm, get my left hand free. But of course my cell phone is in my right pocket, where else would it be? I am right-handed, or was anyway, and hope to be again, when I get out of this mess. Anyway it seems there is no way to reach across my body to get the phone, not without falling. By now I have been hanging here fifteen or twenty seconds — a lifetime — and nothing seems too funny anymore. The humor began draining out when I pulled on the S-link, and now I need a refill.

I get my left arm back up over the track, steady my right foot on the trash can, take a breath. Panic is nipping at the edges of my adrenaline cloud, but I won’t fall any time soon. Two nights ago, Dollie and I were watching our Netflix disk and saw the preview for 127 Hours, that movie that was big in the Oscars this year, where James Franco plays the hiker who gets his hand caught in some rocks and has to cut it off to free himself. Looks like a downer, we agreed: might pass it up in spite of the rave reviews. Now I feel certain I don’t want to see it. Getting these small questions settled seems to be a sort of helpful upside of the accident.

And somewhere in here I shout once: “Heeeellllp,” just like in the movies. This at least restores humor to the situation. The sound is embarrassing, the concept deeply foolish. Say you could call and call and finally get some passerby to approach the closed garage door from the outside. Say you could explain what the hell has happened and convince them you are not a maniac. Say you could explain how to get in the front door and walk through the house and arrive here and pick up the ladder and put it under your dangling feet. How many multiples will all that be, of the time you really have? The whole idea is hilarious.

Okay, then, it seems we are back to Plan A. I think it over for nearly a second, and an odd surge of confidence comes. My method last time was faulty. Sure. Reaching over with my left hand, I pull on the cable first this time, creating a little slack, then a little more, blessedly relieving the direct pull on the wound. Hook the slack around my elbow and pin it to the track. Then I pluck at the S-link, and this time, this way, it comes out without any special drama.

So now I am free, and I let go the track and tumble down out of my shirt to the floor. As if it only now had permission, the hand begins to hurt like blazes. I am laughing, cursing, yelping all at once. There is blood but less than I expected, a puddle forming on the slick concrete. I find a package of paper towels, tear it open with my teeth, wrap the hand and cradle it like a hurt child. My green shirt still hangs up near the rafters, a flag to mark the incident, on this spot et cetera.

 I take one quick look at the wound, which extends three inches or so along the base of the thumb, quite deep and wide, a butterflied pork chop. Shakespeare: all his wounds were mouths. This one could be, the lips open, ready to shout “Stupid!” perhaps. Shockingly, the hand seems not quite me anymore, not in the same sense it was three minutes ago. Yet one part of my dizzy brain feels that weird prideful pleasure your own hurts can give you. Awesome wound, dude. Had he his hurts before? Another compartment contains unalloyed dismay: what have I lost here, how fixable will this be, how long the convalescence? And the pain, dear me, the shaking, what about those?

Everything is going to be all right. My wife will come, she will take me to the hospital and watch everyone fiercely until I am given adequate care. Two Vikoden and several stinging shots of Lidocaine will alter the whole tenor of the afternoon. A simple exam will show that the greasy little hook has wounded neither veins nor tendons, and an X-Ray that all bones are intact. A prescription for antibiotics and eight big stitches, unaccompanied by the row of deeper, dissolving sutures a more conscientious ER might have installed, will nevertheless prove adequate to close the wound and stave off infection. In two months nothing will remain of the episode but some deep soreness, a little scar, and many bills.

But I do not know any of this yet. Right now I am still huddled on the garage floor, shirtless, cradling the wrapped-up hand, grieving it, trying to stop shaking so I can fish the cell phone out of my pocket to call home. The pain has me cowed and confused. All writers on comedy stress its unmasking of pretense, the determined way it detects and deflates those untrue things we insist on believing about ourselves. And now it seems to me that what has been punctured along with my hand is more than my pretense to being a fixer of garage doors. The pain and fear segue irresistibly to another, larger topic, one that men my age brood about, one that my parents’ long decline has kept especially sharp in recent years: death: how to bear it, how to make a decent exit from the world. My fruitless worry has taken me nowhere, and I still proudly declare what everyone proudly declares: when my time comes, I want everything simple. No chemo, no Depends, no banks of machines or years in the home. Just a quick, clean goodbye.

But what nonsense this is! What a crock! The fiery pain from my hand, throbbing now, making me hiss and whimper, seems to laugh and laugh at the idea. How is a clean exit conceivable, when every atom, every bit of meat you are made of, fights for life with every nerve at its disposal? Live on, says bodily pain, live on, live on, no matter the terms and conditions. You’re not leaving us, oh no, not you, not likely.

 

 

Unready For Hillary

She really is dreadful sometimes: dreadful on camera, dreadful with the microphone, dreadful on the stump. The unshakable impression of dishonesty, consistently reported by half the electorate, comes  mainly from the eyes I think. Wide as windows lacking drapes, they seem to be propped open by some unnatural force. The gaze roves at first, then comes right at you, persists, freezes, and does not quite manage to hide the vast underlying intelligence. So then you feel that she is sizing you up, probing for weakness, looking for some way to use you perhaps. You glance at the door and think you will not buy the car after all, not today.

So start with that mildly unfortunate tic of appearance, then add in a knack for sophistry that is entirely ordinary among politicians, one that, in a man, might be  admired and expected and produce a jocular nickname like, say, Slick Willie. Factor in the Right’s simmering paranoia, add the relentless superficiality of the media, rev up the attack machine, let it run for three decades, and there you have it: a widespread, devoutly held myth of Hillary the Liar, a thrilling apprehension of evil that will not let go no matter what evidence is chewed and spit out and chewed again. After a while, not for the first time in American politics, suspicion becomes its own confirmation. You just know there must be something wrong here, because so little seems wrong: someone must have hidden the evidence.

Then there is the voice. Everything comes too slowly, and the intonations seem to have arrived in a different carton from the words themselves. The pacing, gestures, facial expressions are all a flicker out of phase with the message, just enough to make them feel rehearsed and superadded. She says, “Well, America, we are going to tell them loudly and clearly”—making her perhaps the only native speaker in the country who would not have said “loud and clear” — but she is obeying an oversimple adverb rule she learned in AP English. An advisor has told her at some point that she must show more passion, so midway through the speech, eerily, a switch seems to be flipped, and suddenly she is shouting everything:  the nouns, the verbs, the conjunctions, the sizzling epithets, the humdrum transitions, the substance, the filler, the throwaways, the applause lines, the parts that any child can tell need to be whispered. You grip the edge of your folding chair and wait for someone to jump up and run around behind her and throw the shout switch back off.

Coming out of Super Tuesday with a historic string of victories, she exults as follows:

Now it might be unusual, as I’ve said before, for a presidential candidate to say this, but I’m going to keep saying it: I believe what we need in America today is more love and kindness.

All padding, no merchandise. A great big box full of styrofoam peanuts. But the worst thing is that she intones “love and kindness” so fiercely it sounds like a death threat.

At other times she can fall into a listless sing-song, a hoarse introverted mutter. It seems to happen when she is roving around inside her own head, MIA for a minute, prowling among vast piles of information. Somewhere back in there she has an answer for everything, absolutely everything, and will gladly find it for you if you just wait while she runs to fetch it.

Her ex-presidential spouse looks on, his smile so frozen he could be a tribal mask. You think of the teeth inside that famous head, the incredible pressure they must be under. He has long since sworn to leave off kibbutzing, remove the training wheels, let her fly solo — but, Jesus. Why is it that someone so smart, so incredibly smart, smarter than he ever was, simply cannot learn not to step on her own punch lines? She drones on, giving some damn set of statistics, while the audience tries to laugh, tries to applaud, tries to make a connection that she is all the while, without ever knowing it, coldly spurning. When she gets genuinely excited for a moment, exploring the wonky details of a proposed program, only he can tell, for her pace never varies, and it is as if she is giving a blow-by-blow account of a round of bridge, mercilessly spurred on by her own photographic memory.  Her sentences are all too long. You know where she is heading too early, and then you watch her laboring to get there, choosing her words too carefully. The Wellesley-Yale vocabulary offers far too many possibilities, and there is a very long roster of constituencies that must not be offended. She pauses, starts, pauses, and finally settles on the blandest, dullest, most politically correct word possible. It is Tourette’s Syndrome in reverse.  

You check your watch and think, for a guilty nanosecond, of the Trump rally next door, all the fun those idiots seem to be having. You can afford to have it, fun, when you don’t care that you are wrecking the country.

But you get a grip, re-settle your attention. What is it now? Plans for the Middle East, one of her many strong suits. Some good ideas, tactical expertise, plenty of detail, not half bad. If only she weren’t wearing that wrap that looks like it has been upholstered onto her. 

But she has finally recovered from the string of bad-hair, bad-eyebrow days she had in the eighties and nineties. This new hairstyle looks good. In this crazy year the Toad King, destroyer of worlds, has decreed that women’s appearances are to be, once again, fair game, if not quite the trump-in-spades they once were. Toad King has shown that an old paunchy white man with a cosmically ridiculous comb-over, pig eyes, a widely ridiculed spray-on tan, and a face that billows and droops like a badly pitched tent can purchase a succession of gorgeous daughter-wives, call other women any name he pleases, and remark that supermodel Heidi Klum is “no longer a ten.” It is just women of course who shall be subjected to such judgments. For men, the only requirement is that the check must clear.

Again you think of what Bill must be thinking. Back in 2008, in New Hampshire, a single instant of unguarded emotion — when, exhausted, she miraculously teared up just as the cameras were probing — brought her campaign back from the grave, made spring come early, prolonged the battle to epic length. And now in 2016 — so very much later, not all that much wiser — if she would just, for one damn instant, relax, forget the script, and live in the moment, a startled and grateful country would unquestionably reward her with the presidency.

It was what the Hound Dog himself was always best at: living in the moment. Ask Monica, ask Paula, ask Gennifer. That talent has its drawbacks, like every other.

For a big chunk of the electorate, including a majority of non-college white men, Hillary has always been that girl in high school who attracted you a little, intimidated you a lot, and sometimes, inexplicably, filled you half full with a strange, incoherent anger. Girls needed to be better at everything, of course, so by God she was better. She made straight As, joined lots of clubs, and was nice to everyone. She made the tennis team, patiently sitting on the bench during most matches. She sang lead in the school musical, her performance as good as endless practice could make it, and memorized the entire Constitution for AP History. While you were basically a wreck, buffeted by unruly impulses, her desire hardly seemed to exist; it had all been transmuted into unending, unquestioning good behavior.

So when she and Hound Dog arrived in DC for their first lap, the antipathies were instantaneous and profound. She was Rasputin, Tartuffe, Lady Macbeth. She was a lesbian, and the arrangement with the Dog was purely for show. Here was Mom with all the usual power, but none of the reassuring, redeeming warmth.  Here was Feminism sneaking in the back door, the Balanced Two Career Marriage rammed down America’s unready throat. No one minded that she seemed to provide the good sense in the marriage, the self-control, the spine. All that was in the natural, patriarchal run of things. What was intolerable was her apparent lust for achievements  all her own, specifically for power in that most intimate of spheres, health care. Cold, perfidious, unelected Hillary! It was as if, after a lifetime of being bared and prodded by none but male doctors, you were suddenly reassigned to that pretty new female GP, with nary a by-your-leave. The plan she turned in was arguably a botch, too laboriously assimilated through a mechanical process of consulting, compiling, and splitting all differences, but it was probably doomed in any case. Harry and Louise doused her with a bucket full of old-fashioned sentimentality, and it melted her away on the spot, and all her flow charts and spreadsheets with her.

What brought her back from the dead that time was hard work, of course, but also the bizarre agony of Lewinskygate, a purgatorial ordeal for everyone concerned, not least a public subjected to a drumming deluge of Too Much Information. The state troopers, the unzipped fly, the cigar, the blue dress. At first she was clearly blinded by ideology, but then it began to look weirdly like love. She seemed to learn everything later than we did, and for once we had the drop on her, not vice versa. America was in the awful position of the Friend Who Knows but Can’t Decide Whether to Tell. Hound Dog had at last gotten himself in too deep to swim without her help,  and what oh what would she do when she found out?

What she did was more or less the conventional thing: forgave him and took him back, the lousy SOB, after bouts of bitterness kept mercifully behind doors but readily imagined. What was she supposed to do, kick him out of the White House? The solution she found instead, unlike the health plan, was simple and obvious, and it was vastly merciful to him, to her, to the country, to everything but her own supposedly overblown pride. White Male America, which by that time had had a number of years to reflect on the upside and downside of a spousal paycheck (there was no downside, it turned out), took a breath and sat up, startled. It seemed that there was warmth there after all, and plenty of it, more than your old lady would probably show if you got caught the same way.WMA, a critical swing constituency that would bedevil her before and after, found it rather liked this new Hillary: hurt, humbled, pathetically off stride. For a fleeting, magic moment the carnival of bickering that is America seemed to pause; right and left moved a millimeter closer together, and men and women.  WMA swung over to the other side, in its flighty way, long enough to launch a Senate career that proved successful; for the talent the cameras couldn’t see had always really been there.

So now what? At this point it seems clear that she has repelled the remarkably cordial assault of Gandalf and his Hobbit army, that northern horde that seemed so fearsome for a while. Everyone with a heart will miss Gandalf: his snowy hair, his wonderful growl, his still more wonderful smile, his ex-athlete’s gracefulness, his exquisite timing, and above all his success in changing the national conversation to things that matter. Even those of us who suspected he might prove, in office, a tedious Savonarola, lighting bonfires and not much else, will surely miss him. Pollyannas in our number still hope final victory will hold some prize for him: a new cabinet post, maybe, as Minister of the National Conscience.

But first the Toad King must be defeated. He is girding for battle, crowing and grinning and beckoning, flicking his long tongue in and out among his jowls, a small-eyed Jabba the Hut.  He waits for her down in the weeds and mud, his lips glistening, his huge throat pulsing.  His zombie minions, terrifying creatures who cannot be deterred by fact, reason, decency, or anything short of a shotgun blast between the eyes, croak his praises ever louder. Sober analysts explain that the Princess of Parallelograms has the exact fighting style most calculated to underperform against the King’s underworld judo, with its magic power of neutralizing position papers and bullet points. They predict that he will win a split decision, having first turned the entire nation into a gigantic junior high school, with everyone running up and down the halls crying “Did you hear what he called you?” and “I know you are but what am I?”

So here is what I see happening in November. Eighty-five percent of voters, about evenly divided, go into the booths passionately committed to either the Princess or the Toad, ready to gargle razor blades sooner than vote for the other one. As so often, everything depends on the lukewarm center, the undecideds, the almost-didn’t-make-its. They go in and fasten the curtain, wanting to get the thing over with, wishing they could be home catching a favorite show. But first they must, at long last, decide. This is hard. Very hard. Harder than they expected.

But at length there comes a question: how pissed off am I, really? Then other questions: Do I really think the Chinese, the Mexicans, the women, and the Muslims took my job, or was that really sort of an excuse, and does it matter so much now that I have another job? Do I actually know anyone who has died in a terrorist attack? Do I want Wal-Mart prices to double in a trade war, or a thousand tanks to bloom in Kiev and Damascus? And do I really think a Toad King presidency will be as fun, as all-out ass-kicking pure-d fun, as this crazy campaign has been?

And finally a few quiet, decisive thoughts: if I need entertainment, hey, I’ve got cable, and if I need a date there’s Match.com. But for President, boring is sort of what you want. You could do worse than a bureaucratic slogger who spends every Friday night of her life doing her homework. If she is too much a creature of polls and focus groups, eternally shaping her answer to what she thinks you want to hear, letting her positions drift, isn't that pretty much what democracy itself does? One thing for sure, she’ll be at work on time every Monday, ready to learn her lines and buckle down.

Hillary by 10 pm on the 8th, hands down. Then a presidency nowhere near as bad as people fear.