#09 - A PAINFFUL BIKE RIDE
I was 7yrs. old when Batman came out in theaters in 1987. I remember being taken to the movies to see it and my mom bought the VHS for me when it came out. (which I still have) I had gotten a plastic watch with the JOKER on it and I wore it all the time. I had just gotten out of school and it was a nice warm day so I asked my mom if I could go for a bike ride. I had a new BMX that was really nice and it even had a pair of dice covering the air stems on the tires. My mom had told me that I could ride around the block while she was mowing the yard as long as I checked in with her every time that I passed the house. She told me not to leave the sidewalk and when I rode around the block I was not allowed to get off my bike. I can understand why she had made these rules. For 1 thing, we were not living in the safest part of town. (I can not even tell you how many of my big-wheels had gotten taken from me by bigger kids who never gave them back. I was even getting yelled at by both my mom and Rodger. I can recall being sent to my room a few times and even getting spanked once by Rodger. He whipped me because I had decided to fight a black kid and lost.)I can also understand why my mom had said that she was timing me each time that I had went around the block, it was not just to make sure that I had not gotten off my bike but was a safety measure that would prove to be important on this day in 1989. I do not remember every detail of that day but I know that I had made a few passes around the block, when a girl from my class had seen me ride by her house a few times. I am guessing that she was not allowed to ride all the way around the block, but she was following directly behind me on her bike each time that I came on her side of the block. I guess that we had started to play cops and she was trying to pull me over. I will say that even though we lived in a bad neighborhood, many of our neighbors took really good care of their lawns. (Unlike the neighbors that lived next door to us. I remember that they had all the grass in their front yard pulled up and when it rained their yard became a mud pit.)I remember how I had looked over my shoulder and seen that she was directly behind me, I had turned around in time to see my front wheel get caught in the bare crack that separated the grass line from the sidewalk. (When I worked in the garden department at WALMART in 2007 I would occasionally be reminded of the bike ride that I am discussing in this post, when I would come across one of those tools. LOL traumatized by yard work, no but it fucking hurt!) I fell off the bike when I tried to steer out of the crack left by a yard trimmer, hard. But before that painful vibration of hitting the ground could pulse through my body, the girl that was riding directly behind me ran over my right forearm with her bike. That pain was instant and severe especially when I tried to roll over and sit on my butt. The girl had fell of her bike after she ran over my arm so we were both trying not to cry but, when I looked down at my forearm I began to scream. I remember how I had held out my arm to the girl with my palm down to point out where she had hit me and when I pointed out the tread mark, I had seen that part of my forearm was sagging down like I had the letter 'U' in my skin. It had hurt bad but like most severe breaks that I can remember, the actual sight of the fracture freaked me out. I scared the little girl away when I began screaming but I remember how many people came out of their houses and stared at me. A woman that I did not know tried to calm me down. (Hey honey! There is a screaming, little white boy laying on the ground outside. Lol, I bet at least one person had said that.) I was on the ground for about three minutes and then I had seen my mom running over to me. She had sat down on the ground and held me until the ambulance came. (Given how our relationship has changed over the year's, it is weird having those memories of Dolores.) I do remember seeing the girl that had ran me over, she was watching them put me in the ambulance. (I must have scared the shit out of her that day. I would see her at school but we never spoke to each other again.)Guess who was wearing their JOKER watch? And it was on my right hand! Both my mom and the doctors (I was always taken to the CHILDREN'S MEDICAL CENTER but the ambulance took me to the city hospital. But I do not blame them because my hospital was over 2 hours away) they tried to un-hook it, but the pressure caused by them tugging on my wrist was too much.They had to go ahead and cut the watch off and then a sneaky doctor came into the room. I call him sneaky because when I showed him my arm, he grabbed my arm and squeezed the bottom of my forearm. While he was holding onto my forearm another guy had began to set my arm to be casted. I was taken in to see Dr. Lehner the next day. The watch was in reality, a cheap piece of plastic and even though my mom had told me that she would get me another one she didn't. (If I was the parent in that situation I would have probably said the same thing.lol) Not getting the another JOKER watch was ok because TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES came out a few months later. HELL YEA!!
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