The Pain

I would clean up, I thought, and I would try out for the baseball team. I would have to cut my hair and go through that rigamarole again, but I would surely make the team. I'd been on the County Championship team just the year before.

We were in gym class playing basketball in that horrible free-for-all way that is played when one coach has sixty students. I was going after a loose ball and as I reached, another fellow, an older kid in a higher grade, got there, too, and with all his might he threw the ball in the opposite direction. My hand was still attached. The pain was searing. I couldn't move my arm. It was stuck, somehow, paralyzed. I began walking around with terrified eyes trying to figure out what had happened. The fellow who had thrown the ball just looked at me, staring into my eyes with some sort of evil satisfaction. My shoulder was dislocated. Coach called an ambulance.

At the hospital, I was put on a gurney and left in a room. I would have to wait until my mother got there, they said. She would have to sign some papers. Pain. There was nothing but pain and cold. I could feel myself on the verge of consciousness.

By the time my mother got there and the doctors showed up, the muscled in my arm had become solid. I was wheeled into a room for X-Rays where the aggrieved limb was twisted into any number of hideously rotated positions by an unemotional sadist in a white jacket after which, once again, there was the waiting.

Finally, I was given a shot. It would help the pain, the nurse told me. I waited. But relief was not quick in coming. Rather, the shot made my nose itch. Terribly. I asked my mother to scratch it, and she did, but it was no good. She said it had turned bright red. I could feel it. What the hell were they doing to me, I wondered? But things were going to get worse.

When the doctor came back, he said that my shoulder was dislocated and he would have to pull my arm and try to get the joint properly positioned in it's socket. And he did. Pull, that is. But nothing was giving. And, of course, he pulled harder until I cried out in pain. It was no use, he said without inflection. They would have to take me into surgery.

I was miserable. I had had an allergic reaction to the medicine, I was fiercely cold, and the pain in my shoulder had not receded, and I was still on a gurney.

I was prepped to be sedated. It took forever, my nose still on fire. I was in another room now, my mother somewhere else. I asked a nurse to scratch my nose for me, and she did. She was pretty, I thought, and kind, and I knew I had fallen in love.

"Just count backwards from one hundred. . . " the man who had taped the needle in my arm told me.

I began to come to in the middle of things. It was like waking yourself up in a bad dream where you hear yourself yelling. Vaguely, I was aware of a foot in my armpit, my wrist in the grasp of two urgently pulling hands. And then I went back under.

It was almost dark when we left, my arm bound up in a hospital green sling, my shoulder aching like a sonofabitch. It was my right arm. I was helpless. I couldn't drive my car, for it was a stick shift. I couldn't write. And I certainly wasn't going to be playing baseball.

When I went back to school, I had to sit out of gym, just watching the fellows from the bleachers. The boy who had dislocated my arm had been bragging. I had never really seen him before that day. He was tall and rangy and had a demented look about him. He he had no real friends, but he seemed defiant about it. I didn't know what to do. I knew I would not be getting even.

One day, one of the guys asked me if I knew who his sister was. No, I didn't even know who he was, I said. His sister, it turned out, was the one who used to walk around alone all the time, the simple one that the boys had taken behind the pool hall that evening for an outing. I had been there, and though I had not participated fully, I had seen it. I was scared. This is how things work, I thought. These are the wages of sin. There are paybacks in the universe and you must keep clean. "But I am clean," I protested. To whom, I wasn't certain. I was talking to that inner voice that would come to haunt me, the one that was me but not me, the larger me, perhaps. . . I wasn't certain. Whatever it was, though, I didn't like it. Tenth grade seemed like a loss. I was waiting to heal.