Male Pattern Stupidity

This one goes out to my good buddy, Chris, unfortunate team member of the 45-1s volleyball club. Up and at ‘em, young man!

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Surgery boner—these are two words I’d never heard paired. How does a man get himself into a situation where his wife uses the term “surgery boner”?

Well, I was a faithful attendee of pickup basketball on Sunday mornings. I love the game for its deft balance of poetry and rhythm, grace and power, competition and creativity. I love the pickup format for its delicate harmony of fellowship and fun, shit talking and encouragement, rivalries and revelry. Every Sunday, same guys, teenagers and AARP members, a We-Are-the-World spectrum of race and ethnicity, good guys the lot of them.

One Sunday, though, some guy dropped in I had never seen before. Happens all the time. Most guys read the room and adjust their attitude accordingly. Not this turd. Imagine all the blow-hardiness of a political pundit. Inject that guy with caffeine and cocaine, put a pair of lime green mesh shorts on him, and you have some semblance of this guy’s obnoxiousness.

The guy in the lime green mesh shorts put out this sort of vibe.

That in itself isn’t the worst. Competition tends to draw out the cocky among us, and that’s okay if a person can play. This guy couldn’t. What he could do was run his big, fat, stupid, pube-like whisker-ridden mouth. You can be cocky, or you can be bad, but you can’t be both. And when this shit bird aimed his mouth at me, I surrendered to testosterone, adrenaline, and Male Pattern Stupidity.

He drove the lane and put up a sloppy little floater. I jumped to block it. Core, glutes, quads, ego, my unrelated disdain for the Boston Celtics—I put everything behind it and managed to jump the highest I had since high school, which triggered the slow motion.

You know how time crawls when you’re in a horrific car accident or when an acquaintance approaches you to pitch the financial and lifestyle benefits of Amway or essential oils? Because of this anomaly of traumatic time management, I heard several distinct sounds in the following order.

• The smack of my hand against synthetic leather (for those who aren’t basketball fans, just know that I blocked the knucklehead’s shot).

• The “oohs” and “aahs” of the sideline’s reaction to a get-that-shot-outta-my-kitchen-caliber block.

• The thump of my shoe against that asshat’s flailed leg, a sinful cheap shot that will get you beat to death in less friendly pickup games.

• The pop of my kneecap as it dislodged and made its way to the outside of my leg (it’s an odd feeling when your kneecap becomes a gopher and your body becomes the soil).

• The dry heaving of the sideline’s reaction to the audible knee-cap pop.

• The second pop of my knee as it snapped back into place, triggered by my body slapping onto the concrete.

• And finally, this damn near audible thought: ”My wife is gonna be pissed.”

  

  My knee kinda did this, but without my consent.

I limped to my car, drove home and made an appointment with my HMO, which I’m fairly certain is staffed by the six-toed, cross-eyed siblings and second cousins of the guy I blocked. After a couple weeks of negotiations, bribes, threats, several yo mama insults, and too many revenge fantasies to count, they set me up with an orthopedist.

He looked like the kind of kid standing outside a liquor store who asks me to buy him a pack of smokes or a six-pack of wine coolers. I was fairly certain he had logged more hours on Minecraft and collecting Pokémon than on medical school.

Your standard HMO-provided orthopedic surgeon.

After a practical exam followed by an MRI, the doctor confirmed I had ruptured my ACL and would need a reconstructive surgery. I was presented with two options. I was all in on the allograft, which works like this. Some poor bastard dies, they harvest his tendon, and they Super Glue it to my busted knee cap. I requested a teenaged long-distance runner, perhaps of Kenyan descent. If this wasn’t available, I would settle for an Eastern European gymnast, maybe one whose career was cut short by a tragic Cirque du Soleil stunt gone awry.

Apparently, the menu for donor tendons isn’t all that variable. I asked about sourcing the tendon on the black market and the doctor said he had ethical concerns. I asked if ethics would get in the way if it was his leg. He didn’t respond, just shifted the conversation to the second option—a hamstring graft. Basically, the doctor deli-slices a piece of your backstrap, combines some advanced origami with macramé, and turns it into a ligament. Seemed suspect. Why would I use the same leg that waved the white flag in my moment of need?

The doctor tried to explain to me something about muscle integrity and modern medicine while I tried to explain something about loyalty. I am a man who does not suffer betrayal. I had cut ties with living, breathing human beings for far lesser crimes. Anyhow, those were my two choices—roll the dice on a cadaver, age, vocation, lifestyle choices unknown; or stick with the devil I know. Ultimately, I went with the hamstring graft, but I regret it, not just because it doesn’t feel fully healed all these years later but because I could have had a better conversation piece and, perhaps, a fractional share of an everlasting soul.

You wouldn’t have known the outcome was disappointing according to my wife who met with the doctor while I was coming out of the anesthesia. This is when those two words—”surgery boner”—entered the conversation. “Norm,” my wife said, “The doctor said everything went great.”

“It did?”

“Yes, the doctor was very excited about his work. He practically had a surgery boner.”

My orthopedic surgeon, post-op.

This was disconcerting for any number of reasons, but my mind first thought went to the pre-op appointment where a nurse shaved my leg. Immediately after, the doctor popped in and signed my thigh with a Sharpie. And it felt a tad emasculating, like I was his San Quentin shower toy and he was tattooing me to let the rest of the prison gangs know whose bitch was whose.

When I reminded the doc that I was in for an ACL reconstruction and not doing a reduced sentence for cooperating with authorities, he just nodded grimly and said, “I know that.” He clearly transferred in units for bedside manner from the North Korean Correspondence College of Medicine. You wouldn’t think a guy so sober and dispassionate could manage a boner, surgical or otherwise, but my wife assured me that he was sporting one.

The same day I was shipped home with my wife who had the unfortunate matrimonial duty of taking care of me. First, she helped me get the smell and feel of the hospital off my body. I couldn’t put weight on my leg and we didn’t have a tub, so she wrapped my leg in a trash bag and set up one of our kids’ wooden red chairs in the shower. Then she lathered up a scrub brush and got to work. After I rinsed, she helped me out of the shower and handed me a towel. As I dried myself, I caught a glimpse of my derriere in the mirror.

“Oh, shit!” I said.

“What? What? Oh, my god, what?!” She ran back in the bathroom. “Are you okay?”

“My butt cheeks are bleeding!”

“Oh, no! Let me see…”

“Don’t look! It’s disgusting!”

“I have to look.” It was difficult to keep her in front of me, the busted leg and all. She continued, “I have to know if we have to go back to the hospi—”

And then she started laughing. Like, maybe harder than I’ve ever heard her laugh.

“Why are you laughing? What? What is it?”

She reached for my butt. I tried to slap her hand away, but she got past my defenses and pinched me. When she pinched me, she pinched off a red paint chip. When I sat in the steamy shower on the kids’ chair, the shitty Toys “R” Us paint job ended up all over my ass.

An artistic interpretation of what I thought my butt looked like.

I wish this was the final indignity. Alas, it was not.

Next up, physical therapy. It began at home, and it was as much fun as being back-kicked in the testicles by an ornery donkey. I laid face down in our bed, and my wife tied a strap to my ankle and gave me the other end of it. I had to pull on the strap to draw the heel of my left foot toward my paint-stripped buttocks. The pain was intense. On the agony scale, it registered somewhere between medieval and IRS audit.

Because it was difficult to get in and out of clothes, I spent much of my initial recovery in nothing but plaid boxer shorts and any number of Lakers T-shirts. I was particularly vulnerable while I struggled through the spiritual warfare of physical therapy, and my wife took full advantage. “It is taking everything in me to resist tickling the back of your legs,” she said.

You know how, when you’re doing something that requires not only mental focus but physical exertion, it makes you susceptible to laughter, which only makes everything hurt more? This was that, ratcheted up to 50.

The Pit of Despair is no fairytale. It’s a real place that a wife/nurse can manifest with just a simple attempt at humor.

Eventually, I attended physical therapy at a facility where the goal was to touch my heel to my butt cheek. It would take months. Other men, women, and children were in there with me, all of us nursing our busted and reconstructed ACLs, all of us aiming for that sweet moment of heel-to-butt-cheek ecstasy. Every time someone did it, that person graduated, got to bang a gong, and listen to everyone clap and look upon the victorious effort in admiration and envy.

The beautiful day I finally did it, I felt the tingle of my heel on the fleshy part of my rump, and I knew I was whole again. The physical therapist said, “Good job” without an ounce of emotion, made a note, and then walked away. There was no celebration, no gong, no opportunity to bask in the glow of jealous and adoring schmucks still putting themselves back together.

I told myself it wasn’t a big deal. I was a grown man. I didn’t need to bang a gong. I am, however, a terrible liar, especially to myself. “Excuse me,” I said to the physical therapist.

“Yeah, what’s up?”

“Do I get to bang the gong?”

He looked a little surprised by the question. “Really? You want to bang the gong?”

“Aren’t I supposed to? Ya know, after I touch my heel to my butt? I thought that was what you do?”

“I mean, you can. You just didn’t seem like the gong-banging type.”

“Oh, I’m definitely a banger of gongs.”

“Okay, um…” He walked to the middle of the facility and addressed all the busted and broken people at work. “Attention, everyone…” He checked his clipboard. “Norm?” I nodded. “Norm just completed physical therapy for an ACL reconstruction. All right, go ahead.”

Victory.

I banged that gong with every ounce of pride I could muster. I can still hear its rolling hum, a reminder to keep my cool and steer clear of any would-be surgery boners.

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Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this little piece of schadenfreude, you might consider reading other stories about times I unwittingly beat the shit out of myself.

• Horseplay

• The Mobility Guru

• Making Friends with Agony

• Avocado of Doom

• Or you might read Dig, a novella I wrote about a couple of brothers who also do a pretty good job beating the shit out of each other to darkly comedic effect.