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.