Potrzebie
Saturday, October 10, 2009
Real-life Horror #3: Anti-Maim
Halloween approaches, which means it's time once again for another installment in our Real-life Horror series.
Picture a one-story wooden high school building in East Texas during the early 1950s. While reading science fiction magazines in the study hall, I would occasionally glance at the wart on my right thumb. I had tried various ointments and rumored remedies, but nothing worked. The wart remained.
The chemistry class was an oddity, taught by a young man with a lot of enthusiasm but not much knowledge of chemistry. He would make an impressive entrance with a big smile and say something like, "Hey! This is quite an experiment we will be doing today. Doc Hawkins and I did it last night, and it actually works!"
The chemistry classroom was way at the back of the building, and in the rear of that classroom was a small storeroom, never locked, where the chemicals and other equipment were kept. When I saw the giant-sized jug of sulphuric acid, I immediately knew it could be the solution to my wart problem. But I was baffled by the delivery system. How could I get the acid from jug to wart without becoming a member of the Nub Club? The jug was too large and heavy to tilt without splashing sulphuric acid around.
One day, when no one was in that area of the building, I went into the storeroom and stared at the jug until the answer came to me. I walked outside through the back door of the building and found a long thin wooden stick. Back in the storeroom, I unscrewed the cap as sulphuric fumes wafted free. I inserted the stick and pulled it out. Did I simply put the stick on my thumb? No. That seemed unwise, as I could imagine the acid continuing through the wart and dissolving the bone in my thumb.
By 1954, I had read many EC Comics, so I considered myself fairly expert re body mutilation. Instead of holding the stick over my thumb, I held my thumb over the stick. I very lightly touched the acid to the wart for a fraction of a second and quickly pulled my thumb away. I capped the jug and threw the stick outside. The self-operation was 100% successful. The wart shriveled into nothingness and vanished, with only a tiny trace of a scar.
The phrase "Nub Club" is sometimes heard in Vernon, Florida, a town of the Walking Maimed. According to Ken Dornstein in his book Accidentally, on Purpose: The Making of a Personal Injury Underworld in America (1996), almost 50 men in Vernon and nearby areas collected insurance for faked accidents and self-mutilation. Insurance investigator John J. Healy offered a horrific description of desperation in Vernon that reads like a Graham Ingels EC story: "To sit in your car on a sweltering summer evening on the main street of Nub City, watching anywhere from eight to a dozen cripples walking along the street, gives the place a ghoulish, eerie atmosphere."
Another portrait of life in Vernon came in 1984, as described in 2007 by Thomas Lake in "Dismembered Again" (St. Petersburg Times, September 2, 2007):
Errol Morris, who made the classic documentary Vernon, Florida (1981), commented on the town's insurance-obsessed inhabitants, "They literally became a fraction of themselves to become whole financially." Morris originally arrived in Vernon to film the story of mutilations and loss limbs, but according to the biography at his website, the film "had to be retooled when his subjects threatened to murder him."
Halloween approaches, which means it's time once again for another installment in our Real-life Horror series.Picture a one-story wooden high school building in East Texas during the early 1950s. While reading science fiction magazines in the study hall, I would occasionally glance at the wart on my right thumb. I had tried various ointments and rumored remedies, but nothing worked. The wart remained.
The chemistry class was an oddity, taught by a young man with a lot of enthusiasm but not much knowledge of chemistry. He would make an impressive entrance with a big smile and say something like, "Hey! This is quite an experiment we will be doing today. Doc Hawkins and I did it last night, and it actually works!"
The chemistry classroom was way at the back of the building, and in the rear of that classroom was a small storeroom, never locked, where the chemicals and other equipment were kept. When I saw the giant-sized jug of sulphuric acid, I immediately knew it could be the solution to my wart problem. But I was baffled by the delivery system. How could I get the acid from jug to wart without becoming a member of the Nub Club? The jug was too large and heavy to tilt without splashing sulphuric acid around.
One day, when no one was in that area of the building, I went into the storeroom and stared at the jug until the answer came to me. I walked outside through the back door of the building and found a long thin wooden stick. Back in the storeroom, I unscrewed the cap as sulphuric fumes wafted free. I inserted the stick and pulled it out. Did I simply put the stick on my thumb? No. That seemed unwise, as I could imagine the acid continuing through the wart and dissolving the bone in my thumb.
By 1954, I had read many EC Comics, so I considered myself fairly expert re body mutilation. Instead of holding the stick over my thumb, I held my thumb over the stick. I very lightly touched the acid to the wart for a fraction of a second and quickly pulled my thumb away. I capped the jug and threw the stick outside. The self-operation was 100% successful. The wart shriveled into nothingness and vanished, with only a tiny trace of a scar.
The phrase "Nub Club" is sometimes heard in Vernon, Florida, a town of the Walking Maimed. According to Ken Dornstein in his book Accidentally, on Purpose: The Making of a Personal Injury Underworld in America (1996), almost 50 men in Vernon and nearby areas collected insurance for faked accidents and self-mutilation. Insurance investigator John J. Healy offered a horrific description of desperation in Vernon that reads like a Graham Ingels EC story: "To sit in your car on a sweltering summer evening on the main street of Nub City, watching anywhere from eight to a dozen cripples walking along the street, gives the place a ghoulish, eerie atmosphere."
Another portrait of life in Vernon came in 1984, as described in 2007 by Thomas Lake in "Dismembered Again" (St. Petersburg Times, September 2, 2007):
On June 20, 1984, according to the Associated Press, the Vernon City Council was discussing the firing of the town's only police officer. As a former schoolteacher spoke in protest, council president Narvel Armstrong gaveled him down and adjourned the meeting.
The next part would be hard to believe if weren't on tape. A cameraman for WMBB in Panama City happened to be there, and his footage shows Armstrong, then 46, a slight woman with a white blouse and a helmet of brown hair, walk past another woman and backhand her in the head. You see a barefoot young man join the fight. He pins the teacher against a wall and stands over him. The teacher raises his hands to shield his head, but it does not work. The barefoot man's right fist is tireless. He clocks the teacher six times before the camera turns away. Later you see the teacher's face covered in blood.
You see an older man fighting too. He is thick at the middle, balding, wearing khakis. He punches a woman while the barefoot man holds her arm. He assists in the thrashing of the teacher. You see his right hand whooshing through the air, connecting with flesh, and you look for his left hand but it is gone. In its place is a metal hook.
Errol Morris, who made the classic documentary Vernon, Florida (1981), commented on the town's insurance-obsessed inhabitants, "They literally became a fraction of themselves to become whole financially." Morris originally arrived in Vernon to film the story of mutilations and loss limbs, but according to the biography at his website, the film "had to be retooled when his subjects threatened to murder him."
Labels: horrorda, memoir, real-life horror, wart
¶ 11:23 AM 5 comments
Sunday, October 26, 2008
Real-life horror tale #2
At this time last year I told the real-life horror story of how I became trapped in an unusual freak accident when one of my college instructors thought it would be fun to start pushing me out a second-story window.
Now Halloween is almost here, so time for another real-life horror story…
When I lived in Cambridge during the 1970s, I learned that comic art dealer Jerry Weist and his girlfriend Cathy were not happy with their living situation near Harvard Square. It was a small room in an apartment they had to share with a group of rowdy students. I told them that there might be a place in the building where I was living just off Massachusetts Avenue.
I explained that my landlady was on the first floor, I was on the second floor, and that perhaps the landlady could clear out her storeroom on the third floor. If so, then they could rent that space from her and pay me monthly for the use of my kitchen and bathroom. Jerry and Cathy came over, met the landlady, and surprisingly, everyone involved came to an immediate agreement with no problems.
I then realized the kitchen oven would have to be repaired. I never used it because the oven flame would somehow extinguish itself after a few minutes, yet gas would continue to spew forth. I called a repair service, and someone came over to fix it. When he left, I gave the repair bill to the landlady. A few days later, Jerry and Cathy moved in, and the living arrangement seemed to work to everyone’s mutual satisfaction.
One day, Cathy experienced a close call; she had been drinking beer and eating potato chips when she discovered a portion of a razor-sharp cutting blade in the bag of potato chips. I told her about a lawyer I knew, and even though she had never put the metal in her mouth, the lawyer succeeded in getting the Borden company to send a check.
Cathy was not happy with her job and missed her friends in the Midwest. She announced she was leaving, and a week later, she moved back to Kansas. Jerry continued to live in the upstairs room and suggested that with Cathy gone, he should now pay me less rent for the kitchen and bathroom. I was surprised by this, said no to the idea, and he continued to pay the same amount.
The headphones for my stereo had an extremely long wire. I came back to the apartment one afternoon and noticed that Jerry was obviously listening to my stereo, since the wire ran all the way into the hallway and up the staircase to the third floor. Instead of complaining about this, I went to lie down because I suddenly felt quite sleepy.
The next thing I knew, I was being awakened by Jerry, who was shaking me and saying loudly, “Gas… gas!” Obviously, the repairman had done nothing to fix the oven; it was still a lethal instrument. Jerry had been cooking something and then had gone upstairs, unaware that the entire second floor was filling with gas from the defective oven. By the time he came down the stairs to check on his food, I had already passed out, and my bedroom had become a death chamber.
While he went around opening windows, I managed to stagger down the stairs and out the front door, nearly collapsing on the sidewalk where I stood inhaling fresh air until my head cleared. Whenever I recall this incident, I ponder the alternative endings. One, of course, being the possibility that Jerry never saw me in the bedroom and thus I was never awakened. The other is like the final scene of Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun when Maria (Hanna Schygulla) returns home, lights a match and her entire house explodes.
What are the odds of getting gassed twice? Some years later, I was in New York working at DC Comics and living in Queens. I had been told that the previous tenant had a job with the Brooklyn gas company. Perhaps that explained why the apartment had no stove when I moved in; he had simply disconnected the gas and taken the stove when he left. One day the elderly landlord's son came by to notify me of a rent increase. I countered with the suggestion that he supply a stove. He agreed, and soon a brand new stove was installed. It worked perfectly. Then I noticed an oddity: no matter how much gas I used, no bills arrived. It was somewhat reminiscent of that 1941 William Saroyan play, The Beautiful People, about an entire family living on monthly pension checks mistakenly addressed to a dead man.
Months passed with no gas bills. One day, after noticing a gas truck parked in front, I opened my door and heard the gas man talking to the family on the floor above as he turned on their gas. He finished the job, walked past my door on the way down and in less than a minute I became aware that gas was pouring into my room, obviously triggered by whatever pipes he had opened for the floor above. Was it so much gas that it could be ignited by the pilot light on the stove? I had to get it fixed before he drove away. I ran down the stairs, out the front door, across the sidewalk, slammed into the side of his truck and explained in a rush what was happening. He stared at me in disbelief and then wordlessly studied his paperwork as I kept babbling. Then he slowly got out of the truck and went upstairs. When he made some adjustments, the flow of gas ceased. After calling into his headquarters, he turned and scowled at me, a look suggesting that I was somehow responsible, and said, "Okay, buddy, that's it. This won't be retroactive, but from now on, you're going to be billed. Got that, pal?"
At this time last year I told the real-life horror story of how I became trapped in an unusual freak accident when one of my college instructors thought it would be fun to start pushing me out a second-story window.
Now Halloween is almost here, so time for another real-life horror story…
When I lived in Cambridge during the 1970s, I learned that comic art dealer Jerry Weist and his girlfriend Cathy were not happy with their living situation near Harvard Square. It was a small room in an apartment they had to share with a group of rowdy students. I told them that there might be a place in the building where I was living just off Massachusetts Avenue.
I explained that my landlady was on the first floor, I was on the second floor, and that perhaps the landlady could clear out her storeroom on the third floor. If so, then they could rent that space from her and pay me monthly for the use of my kitchen and bathroom. Jerry and Cathy came over, met the landlady, and surprisingly, everyone involved came to an immediate agreement with no problems.
I then realized the kitchen oven would have to be repaired. I never used it because the oven flame would somehow extinguish itself after a few minutes, yet gas would continue to spew forth. I called a repair service, and someone came over to fix it. When he left, I gave the repair bill to the landlady. A few days later, Jerry and Cathy moved in, and the living arrangement seemed to work to everyone’s mutual satisfaction.
One day, Cathy experienced a close call; she had been drinking beer and eating potato chips when she discovered a portion of a razor-sharp cutting blade in the bag of potato chips. I told her about a lawyer I knew, and even though she had never put the metal in her mouth, the lawyer succeeded in getting the Borden company to send a check.
Cathy was not happy with her job and missed her friends in the Midwest. She announced she was leaving, and a week later, she moved back to Kansas. Jerry continued to live in the upstairs room and suggested that with Cathy gone, he should now pay me less rent for the kitchen and bathroom. I was surprised by this, said no to the idea, and he continued to pay the same amount.
The headphones for my stereo had an extremely long wire. I came back to the apartment one afternoon and noticed that Jerry was obviously listening to my stereo, since the wire ran all the way into the hallway and up the staircase to the third floor. Instead of complaining about this, I went to lie down because I suddenly felt quite sleepy.
The next thing I knew, I was being awakened by Jerry, who was shaking me and saying loudly, “Gas… gas!” Obviously, the repairman had done nothing to fix the oven; it was still a lethal instrument. Jerry had been cooking something and then had gone upstairs, unaware that the entire second floor was filling with gas from the defective oven. By the time he came down the stairs to check on his food, I had already passed out, and my bedroom had become a death chamber.
While he went around opening windows, I managed to stagger down the stairs and out the front door, nearly collapsing on the sidewalk where I stood inhaling fresh air until my head cleared. Whenever I recall this incident, I ponder the alternative endings. One, of course, being the possibility that Jerry never saw me in the bedroom and thus I was never awakened. The other is like the final scene of Fassbinder’s The Marriage of Maria Braun when Maria (Hanna Schygulla) returns home, lights a match and her entire house explodes.
What are the odds of getting gassed twice? Some years later, I was in New York working at DC Comics and living in Queens. I had been told that the previous tenant had a job with the Brooklyn gas company. Perhaps that explained why the apartment had no stove when I moved in; he had simply disconnected the gas and taken the stove when he left. One day the elderly landlord's son came by to notify me of a rent increase. I countered with the suggestion that he supply a stove. He agreed, and soon a brand new stove was installed. It worked perfectly. Then I noticed an oddity: no matter how much gas I used, no bills arrived. It was somewhat reminiscent of that 1941 William Saroyan play, The Beautiful People, about an entire family living on monthly pension checks mistakenly addressed to a dead man.
Months passed with no gas bills. One day, after noticing a gas truck parked in front, I opened my door and heard the gas man talking to the family on the floor above as he turned on their gas. He finished the job, walked past my door on the way down and in less than a minute I became aware that gas was pouring into my room, obviously triggered by whatever pipes he had opened for the floor above. Was it so much gas that it could be ignited by the pilot light on the stove? I had to get it fixed before he drove away. I ran down the stairs, out the front door, across the sidewalk, slammed into the side of his truck and explained in a rush what was happening. He stared at me in disbelief and then wordlessly studied his paperwork as I kept babbling. Then he slowly got out of the truck and went upstairs. When he made some adjustments, the flow of gas ceased. After calling into his headquarters, he turned and scowled at me, a look suggesting that I was somehow responsible, and said, "Okay, buddy, that's it. This won't be retroactive, but from now on, you're going to be billed. Got that, pal?"
Labels: brooklyn, cambridge, gas, Halloween, horrorda, queens, real-life horror
¶ 12:36 PM 4 comments
Friday, October 17, 2008
Sax by Sala
Control click heading above to hear "The Secret Universe" by Diatonis.
Control click heading above to hear "The Secret Universe" by Diatonis.
Our pre-Halloween warm-up continues with more Richard Sala illustrations from Doctor Sax and the Great World Snake. See previous post.
Sala was born in Oakland and grew up in Chicago where his father was an antiques dealer. Charles Addams, Lee Brown Coye and Chester Gould were all influences on Sala. In a 2006 interview with Logan Kaufman, one reads between the lines to find that twisted aspects of Sala's art can be traced back to his childhood with an abusive father:
Sala was born in Oakland and grew up in Chicago where his father was an antiques dealer. Charles Addams, Lee Brown Coye and Chester Gould were all influences on Sala. In a 2006 interview with Logan Kaufman, one reads between the lines to find that twisted aspects of Sala's art can be traced back to his childhood with an abusive father:
My father was not a happy man. He was angry and irrational and would often terrorize me and my brother and sister with violence or threats of violence. This was the mid-1960s, and he was an "old school" first generation Sicilian with what they used to call "a temper," so disciplining kids by hitting them was not as foreign a concept as it is now, perhaps. I got hit with all kinds of things -- belts, hairbrushes, pieces of wood, books... but even in my high school a few years later kids would get spanked with a paddle in front of the class if they offended the teacher in some way.... It was a different era.
Anyway, I guess you can say that my relationship with my father did mess me up a bit, because, although there was cruelty and irrational behavior, nevertheless, my father is where I get almost all of my creative side from. He knew how to draw, which always amazed me as a kid, and he had a love and knowledge of old movies and monsters and weird popular culture stuff that has come to define who I am, too. It's very complicated -- or rather it's one for the shrinks, I guess... I remember watching cartoons with him and he was able to draw the characters that were on TV as they appeared on the screen. That impressed me, I remember. I also remember my cousins watching in awe as he drew pictures of pirates or cowboys during one summer vacation. I think maybe that's when I realized that it was considered "cool". But he wasn't schooled in art, unless it was maybe some classes due to the GI Bill after WWII. He only had an 8th grade education and had done all this macho stuff like being in a post-war motorcycle gang, ala The Wild One, and being a lumberjack in the Pacific Northwest. I saw photos of all these adventures, or I may not have believed them myself.
Anyway, I guess you can say that my relationship with my father did mess me up a bit, because, although there was cruelty and irrational behavior, nevertheless, my father is where I get almost all of my creative side from. He knew how to draw, which always amazed me as a kid, and he had a love and knowledge of old movies and monsters and weird popular culture stuff that has come to define who I am, too. It's very complicated -- or rather it's one for the shrinks, I guess... I remember watching cartoons with him and he was able to draw the characters that were on TV as they appeared on the screen. That impressed me, I remember. I also remember my cousins watching in awe as he drew pictures of pirates or cowboys during one summer vacation. I think maybe that's when I realized that it was considered "cool". But he wasn't schooled in art, unless it was maybe some classes due to the GI Bill after WWII. He only had an 8th grade education and had done all this macho stuff like being in a post-war motorcycle gang, ala The Wild One, and being a lumberjack in the Pacific Northwest. I saw photos of all these adventures, or I may not have believed them myself.
Labels: addams, coye, gould, Halloween, horrorda, invisible hands, kerouac, mtv, sala
¶ 11:17 PM 1 comments
Monday, October 06, 2008
Jack Kerouac reads from Doctor Sax
Control click heading above to hear Anna Domino's haunting interpretation of "Pome on Doctor Sax".
In 1957, Kerouac was asked what he considered his best book, and he answered, "A book called Doctor Sax, a kind of Gothic fairy tale, a myth of puberty, about some kids in New England playing around in this empty place when a shadow suddenly comes out at them, a real shadow. A real shadow." Our pre-Halloween celebration continues with two videos which combine Kerouac's voice with photos of Lowell, the setting of Doctor Sax. The first is by Gottfried Geist, who has many other videos about writers which you can see here. (To reread Potrzebie's 2007 Halloween Celebration with the real-life horror tale "University of Horrorda," click on "horrorda" in the labels at bottom.)
More Lowell images set to this 1961 audiotape of Kerouac reading.
Another production of Doctor Sax is a CD audio drama created by Kerouac 's nephew, Jim Sampas, in 2003. Sampas based his script on Kerouac's unproduced screenplay, Doctor Sax and the Great World Snake. The release on Sampas' independent record label, Gallery Six (named for the Six Gallery reading), consisted of two CDs and a book with the screenplay illustrated by Richard Sala. Music score by John Medeski. Cast: Robert Creeley (narration), Jim Carroll (Jackie Duluoz, Count Condu), Robert Hunter (Doctor Sax), Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Wizard), Kate Pierson (Vamp Contessa), Graham Parker (Baroque), Ellis Paul (Lousy), Bill Janovitz.
NPR: Bob Edwards interviews Jim Sampas, plus excerpts from Doctor Sax and the Great World Snake (RealPlayer).
©2008 Jack Kerouac Estate
Doctor Sax the master knower of Easter was now reduced to penury and looking at stained glass windows in old churches - His only two last friends in life, this impossibly hard life no matter under what conditions it appears, were Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, who visited him annually in his room on Third Street and cut through the fogs of evening with their heads bent ...
Excerpt from Chapter 10 of Doctor Sax: It was in Centralville I was born, in Pawtucketville saw Doctor Sax. Across the wide basin to the hill--on Lupine Road, March 1922, at five o’clock in the afternoon of a red-all-over suppertime, as drowsily beers were tapped on Moody and Lakeview saloons and the river rushed with her cargoes of ice over reddened slick rocks, and on the shore the reeds swayed among mattresses and cast-off boots of Time, and lazily pieces of snow dropped plunk from bagging branches of black thorny oily pine in their thaw, and beneath the wet snows of the hillside receiving the sun’s lost rays the melts of winter mixed with roars of Merrimac was born. Bloody rooftop. Strange deed. All eyes I came hearing the river’s red; I remember that afternoon, I perceived it through beads hanging in a door and through lace curtains and glass of a universal sad lost redness of mortal damnation ... the snow was melting. The snake coiled in the hill not my heart.
Young Doctor Simpson who later became tragic tall and grayhaired and unloved, snapping his--"I think everything she is going to be alright, Angy," he said to my mother who’d given birth to her first two, Gerard and Catherine, in a hospital.
"Tank you Doctor Simpson, he’s fat like a tub of butter--mon ti n’ange..." Golden birds hovered over her and me as she hugged me to her breast; angels and cherubs made a dance, and floated from the ceiling with upsidedown assholes and thick folds of fat, and there was a mist of butterflies, birds, moths and brownesses hanging dull and stupid over pouting births.
More Lowell images set to this 1961 audiotape of Kerouac reading.
Another production of Doctor Sax is a CD audio drama created by Kerouac 's nephew, Jim Sampas, in 2003. Sampas based his script on Kerouac's unproduced screenplay, Doctor Sax and the Great World Snake. The release on Sampas' independent record label, Gallery Six (named for the Six Gallery reading), consisted of two CDs and a book with the screenplay illustrated by Richard Sala. Music score by John Medeski. Cast: Robert Creeley (narration), Jim Carroll (Jackie Duluoz, Count Condu), Robert Hunter (Doctor Sax), Lawrence Ferlinghetti (Wizard), Kate Pierson (Vamp Contessa), Graham Parker (Baroque), Ellis Paul (Lousy), Bill Janovitz.NPR: Bob Edwards interviews Jim Sampas, plus excerpts from Doctor Sax and the Great World Snake (RealPlayer).
©2008 Jack Kerouac Estate
Labels: doctor sax, ferlinghetti, horrorda, kerouac, lowell, moody street, sala, sampas
¶ 2:35 PM 0 comments
Wednesday, October 31, 2007
University of Horrorda
©2007 Tribune Media
I think we need a real-life horror story here for Halloween.
My memory of the incident below came back while I was reading about the death of Carol Gotbaum in the Phoenix airport. Her handcuffs were secured by a short chain attached to the back of the bench where she was sitting. She probably died when she twisted around, found the chain pressing against her neck and then was unable to move from that position.
My own situation was more akin to Edgar Allan Poe's 1838 short story, "A Predicament," in which the narrator climbs the interior of a Gothic cathedral. Here is the Black Mass audio adaptation. After the narrator sticks her head through a hole in the face of the steeple's gigantic clock to admire the city, she soon discovers that the clock's immense steel minute-hand has moved against her neck, pinning her with no escape:
My memory of the incident below came back while I was reading about the death of Carol Gotbaum in the Phoenix airport. Her handcuffs were secured by a short chain attached to the back of the bench where she was sitting. She probably died when she twisted around, found the chain pressing against her neck and then was unable to move from that position.
My own situation was more akin to Edgar Allan Poe's 1838 short story, "A Predicament," in which the narrator climbs the interior of a Gothic cathedral. Here is the Black Mass audio adaptation. After the narrator sticks her head through a hole in the face of the steeple's gigantic clock to admire the city, she soon discovers that the clock's immense steel minute-hand has moved against her neck, pinning her with no escape:
"Turning my head gently to one side, I perceived, to my extreme horror, that the huge, glittering, scimitar-like minute-hand of the clock had, in the course of its hourly revolution, descended upon my neck. There was, I knew, not a second to be lost. I pulled back at once–but it was too late. There was no chance of forcing my head through the mouth of that terrible trap in which it was so fairly caught, and which grew narrower and narrower with a rapidity too horrible to be conceived. The agony of that moment is not to be imagined."
When I was in college, I had some classes in a towering 19th-century Gothic building constructed in 1889. One day, I found myself alone in a room in that building with Lyn Murray, an instructor I disliked. It may be that he sensed my reaction to him. While we were talking, I sat on a radiator with my back to a window about six inches behind me. The radiator had a metal radiator cover on top. Murray suddenly decided it would be amusing to act like he was pushing me out the window. I guess the fact that we were one flight up made it more amusing to him. He moved toward me with a big grin on his face and grabbed both of my shoulders.
When he pushed me back towards the window, I reached to hold on as a natural reflex. I put both hands between my legs and grabbed the front edge of the radiator cover. It was then I realized that the metal cover was not attached but was just loosely positioned on top. As he pushed, it tilted backwards. When he released my shoulders, the heavy object swung back down.
As it fell into place, my left hand was pinned, and I felt excruciating pain as my entire body weight and the weight of the metal cover were both pressing a 1/4th-inch wide front metal fringe against the fingers of my left hand. I knew instantly that I could not roll forward, as it might break my fingers (and I would fall face forward toward the floor). I could not go backward because I would then be pulling in the wrong direction from where my hand was caught (and possibly could actually go out the window). I could not bring my leg under my arm. I also felt like my fingers might break with any extra movement. I calculated all options in a split second and knew they would all fail. I was trapped.
I could see only one solution. He was standing in front of me, looking in horror at the expression on my face, as I gasped, "Lift me up." Without hesitating, he grabbed me under the armpits and pulled me straight up. As he did so, I managed to pull the radiator cover up an inch, and my hand slipped free. The cover crashed back into place. My fingers were intact, and I stood there rubbing them until the pain went away. Speechless, he stared aghast at my reddened fingers, probably thinking that if I went to the college clinic, his teaching career would be over.
It had all happened within 15 seconds. There were no witnesses, and it may be that I never discussed the incident with anyone. If such a situation happened at a college today, a student would probably call a lawyer and sue the school for $20 million.
When I was in college, I had some classes in a towering 19th-century Gothic building constructed in 1889. One day, I found myself alone in a room in that building with Lyn Murray, an instructor I disliked. It may be that he sensed my reaction to him. While we were talking, I sat on a radiator with my back to a window about six inches behind me. The radiator had a metal radiator cover on top. Murray suddenly decided it would be amusing to act like he was pushing me out the window. I guess the fact that we were one flight up made it more amusing to him. He moved toward me with a big grin on his face and grabbed both of my shoulders.
When he pushed me back towards the window, I reached to hold on as a natural reflex. I put both hands between my legs and grabbed the front edge of the radiator cover. It was then I realized that the metal cover was not attached but was just loosely positioned on top. As he pushed, it tilted backwards. When he released my shoulders, the heavy object swung back down.
As it fell into place, my left hand was pinned, and I felt excruciating pain as my entire body weight and the weight of the metal cover were both pressing a 1/4th-inch wide front metal fringe against the fingers of my left hand. I knew instantly that I could not roll forward, as it might break my fingers (and I would fall face forward toward the floor). I could not go backward because I would then be pulling in the wrong direction from where my hand was caught (and possibly could actually go out the window). I could not bring my leg under my arm. I also felt like my fingers might break with any extra movement. I calculated all options in a split second and knew they would all fail. I was trapped.
I could see only one solution. He was standing in front of me, looking in horror at the expression on my face, as I gasped, "Lift me up." Without hesitating, he grabbed me under the armpits and pulled me straight up. As he did so, I managed to pull the radiator cover up an inch, and my hand slipped free. The cover crashed back into place. My fingers were intact, and I stood there rubbing them until the pain went away. Speechless, he stared aghast at my reddened fingers, probably thinking that if I went to the college clinic, his teaching career would be over.
It had all happened within 15 seconds. There were no witnesses, and it may be that I never discussed the incident with anyone. If such a situation happened at a college today, a student would probably call a lawyer and sue the school for $20 million.
Labels: gothic, horrorda, memoir, painting, poe, real-life horror, university
¶ 6:35 AM 2 comments
