Ain't Pretty No More

I assumed it was just the rain. It was raining hard that morning. It was dripping off the brim of my hat, and the wind was whipping it into my face. So I figured it was just the rain, and kept tapping my way up 9th St. toward the subway. It was shortly after 6 a.m. It was too goddamned early, and there was that rain, but things were okay. I had a lot on my mind, but none of it was too troublesome. Just some things to think about as I walked. The cane did all the work for me, so I could, in essence, sit back and enjoy the ride.

Every morning, on the last half of the last block before I turn onto 9th, I tap my way along a big wrought-iron fence. This can be tricky sometimes, and irksome. Tapping along the metal almost always echoes more loudly than I'd like, but it's a useful tool. See, right at the corner, where the two sides of the fence meet at a post, the "tap" abruptly takes on a different quality. Instead of a hollow clanging, the tap becomes more solid, more of a "thunk," and the echo disappears. Every morning and every night, that's my signal to turn.

So I'm tapping along the fence, thinking about various things (as I said), lending half an ear to the sound the cane was making. When I heard the thunk, I did what I always do-I braced the cane against the post, and slid my way around the corner. (If you've seen Werner Herzog's documentary about Klaus Kinski, My Best Fiend, it's a move not unlike what he describes as the "Kinski Shift.") It's a trick I've come to learn these past few years. Keeps me from veering too close to the traffic.

That rainy morning, however, as I began to take that first step up 9th, I encountered the same damn thing I've encountered so many times in the past. At the same moment I realize that I am no longer moving forward, I hear a slight crunch, and find myself, quite suddenly, in a great deal of pain.

I took a step backward, my eyes watering. The crunching sound, I could tell, had come from my nose. That's when I realized that when the sound of the tap had changed, it wasn't signaling that I was at the corner post-it was signaling, instead, that the cane had slid between two bars of the fence-and that instead of swinging myself around the post, I'd actually swung myself, face first (always lead with the face) directly into the post.

I shook my head clear, still in a great deal of pain, and took inventory. My nose wasn't bleeding. That was good. It didn't seem to be broken at all. That was good too. I'd broken my nose once, while attempting to play broom hockey on a frozen lake in Northern Wisconsin when I was 14, and so knew what to look for.

I wasn't dizzy, either, which was another good sign. If I had given myself a (well, another) concussion, it was likely only a very small one. Surprising, given how hard I'd whacked that goddamned post.

Everything in some sort of apparent order, I took the necessary extra step, and then continued tapping my way up 9th St. through the rain.

It seemed to be coming down harder now. My coat and hands weren't all that wet, but the brim of the hat had started gathering and dumping much more rain down my face than it had been earlier.

I began to think about a story I'd been told once. A friend of mine back in Wisconsin had a grade school teacher, he told me, who was in a car accident. Not a bad one, but she bumped her head on the windshield. They took her to the hospital, checked her over, and when everything came back clear, they sent her home. Once she got home, she felt fine. But a few days later, she got a runny nose. Didn't have a cold or anything-just a runny nose, and she couldn't stop it. It ran all the time, and she found herself blowing her nose constantly. It was the damnedest thing. Still, she thought it was nothing more than a simple annoyance.

When the autopsy was performed a few weeks later, they discovered that the fluid sack around her brain had been ruptured-clearly the result of that minor car accident-and all of the cushioning fluid had flowed out her nostrils. Then she died.

The more I think of that story, the more it sounds like an urban legend, but he swore it was true. Happened to his teacher. Or at least one at the school he went to.

Not that I feared any such thing for myself-I'd certainly taken worse blows to the head over the years-it just came to mind, is all. I tapped my way to the subway without further incident.

Once downstairs, I folded up the cane and replaced it in the bag, then reached up to wipe some of that damned rain off my face. It wasn't immediately clear that something was terribly, terribly wrong-something just seemed a little off. The water just wasn't as slick as rainwater usually is. It seemed a little viscous.

Well, I figured, it was probably just mixing with the sweat or something, though it was a chilly morning, and I had no recollection of sweating.

The other thing that was weird was that it still seemed to be rolling down my face, even though I'd just wiped it off. That was easy enough to blame on the hat, though. That thing can stay soaked for days.

Only when I looked at the hand I'd just used to wipe myself off and saw that it was much redder than usual did everything become clear. I can be so stupid sometimes.

Once when I was eight, I was playing a game called "Disaster at the Airport" in my friend Robb's basement (I won't go into details on what the game involved). Anyway, my plane had skittered across the tile floor before coming to rest against the wall. I trotted over to pick it up, but in so doing, found myself in the same situation described above-as I bent down, my head suddenly stopped moving forward. Then I was in pain. Difference here was that I couldn't stand back up, having apparently become hooked on something somehow (it turned out to be a metal bracket of some sort). I managed to tear myself free, then crawled around on the floor in a melodramatic fashion, screaming and clutching my head. Robb's mom arrived and at her urgings, I pulled my hand away from my forehead, only to discover that my palm was thick with blood. That's when I really began to scream.

In this case on the sidewalk, though, it wasn't my forehead. Instead, it seems I had split the bridge of my nose wide open, at the exact spot which still carried a thin white scar from the time I had broken it 23 years earlier.

Well, not much wanting to get on a morning train dripping blood (well, not really wanting to), I reached back into my bag and removed one of my notebooks, flipped it to the back so I wouldn't lose any "important notage," and tore out a few pages.

After licking the first one, I began mopping at my mouth and cheeks, which were evidently well-covered. I quickly understood that this achieved nothing more than the smearing of the blood across the as-yet-unbloodied parts of my face.

Christ, I'm gonna end up looking like Dick the Bruiser, I thought. His face was always covered in blood.

I took the next page and, leaving it dry, daubed directly at the wound itself. Once that page was all used up, I shoved it into my coat pocket and reached for another.

When the train arrived, I had gone through four or five pages, and was still at it. The blood still seemed to be flowing rather freely. Still daubing, however, I stepped aboard and, as usual, make a quick scan for empty seats. I found one, thank God, in a corner, sliding in close next to a large fellow reading the Post.

Though I kept the brim of my hat pulled low, and tried to bleed and daub as inconspicuously as possible, when the guy with the Post noticed what was happening right next to him, he folded up his paper, stood and moved down the aisle to the other end of the car. No one took his place. It just makes sense, I imagine, blood becoming a form of chemical weaponry in recent years and all.

At the end of the interminable ride, my hands were covered with it. It had dripped on my coat and my bag. And I still had no idea what I looked like. Thank God it was still dark out, and raining. I could keep my head down, let the drippage fall straight to the sidewalk, and tap my way into the office. Along the way, nobody said a word, asked how I was or offered assistance. That's certainly understandable, too. Or maybe I just hid it really well. Or maybe everyone else out in the rain at that hour had their own problems to think about.

Once inside the office, I dropped the bag and the coat and headed for the bathroom, where I turned on the water in the sink and examined myself for the first time. There seemed, at first, to be a big hole-like the entry wound of a large caliber bullet-in the middle of my face. The rest of my face was smeared up pretty bad, but seemed okay. I've always been reasonably monkey-faced, and this just seemed to add to the whole "simian mystique."

I began to think of what I would tell people, should they ask. I could say I was in a "really savage bar fight" with this "huge guy who looked like Lawrence Tierney." That sounded a lot better than "I walked into a fence." Somehow, though, nowadays I wasn't sure how far that would fly.

The more I washed the wound out, trying to see what was behind all that blood, the less severe it seemed. Finally, all that was left was a tiny jagged crack, intersecting my previous nose scar at a 45 degree angle. Noses are like scalps that way-they'll bleed like stuck pigs if you look at them funny. This thing here, when you got down to it, wasn't too bad at all. Still smarted like a son of a bitch, though.