Wednesday, June 09, 2004
OK, for future reference, here's something you don't want to do:
Wednesday at work, steaming pissed about the conspiracy of the fates and the incompetence of various employees and affiliates of United Parcel Service*, I punctuated a declaration of my frustration and rage by punching a countertop in my office. Straight down like the express elevator and with all the force of a heavyweight contender with a title shot.
As a result, my right hand and wrist — not merely my punching hand (I jab with the left), but my bread-and-butter hand, the one with which I write, even when I'm not employing a keyboard — hurt like hell for most of Wednesday. I expect to experience pain and discomfort at regular intervals for the next several days, thanks to my unfortunate misdirection of the electrical impulses that carry wartime communiqués from my brain to the soldiers along the front lines of my central nervous system.
The key word in that last paragraph is "experience," as in "I shall experience pain." My co-worker Chris was visibly impressed with the fact that I didn't pull my punch — the countertop took the brunt of everything I have to give — but nonetheless observed, with the experience of his 51 years, "Yeah, I have to keep reminding myself not to do shit like that anymore. I don't heal as quickly as I used to." As I close in on 37, I could stand to be reminded a little more often that my own apparent invincibility is, in fact, transparent, and growing more illusory every day.
Still, I can type — although certain of my usual reaches and flourishes hurt like hell — and I'm able to do a number of other things with my right hand that lead me to believe that I'm not presently suffering from numerous compound fractures. For that I count myself lucky; otherwise, I'm in the E.R. and you aren't reading this now.
This story would not have such a happy ending, I believe, if not for two simple but immutable truths:
1. While my diet suffers in many areas, I like to believe that I'm getting more than my recommended daily allowance of calcium. ("Latté — it does a body good.")
2. Poppy.
"Poppy" is my grandfather, the late Howard Everett Rutherford. Poppy trained young boxers in the basement of my mother's childhood home in Joplin, Missouri. Both my Uncle Don and my Uncle Jerry were Golden Gloves prizefighters in their youth. More to the point, my mother was a cheerleader, but late one evening, a mere schoolgirl, she chased a peeping Tom down Bird Avenue with a baton she was practicing with. She didn't catch up to the guy. Not for nothing, but had I been alive circa 1958, my money would've been on my mom.
My point being, we Rutherfords don't back down from a fight, and we know how to throw a friggin' punch.
Anyway, when I was about 9 years old, Poppy taught me how to throw one. One night after work — I was staying with him and Grandma in Joplin at the time — he took me out to the car. They owned one of those early '70s Chrysler Newports that would have been favored in the circles of organized crime — you coulda fit three freshly whacked bodies in that trunk and still had room for your golf clubs. On this particular evening, though, Poppy opened the trunk to reveal the gift of a brand-new 75-pound Everlast heavy bag.
I'm a writer now. I was a sensitive child then. He was probably afraid I'd grow up to be some pussy who couldn't defend himself.
We couldn't hang the bag that night. (It soon hung in the garage of our house in Neosho, Missouri. Right now, it's in my parents' basement in Kansas City — not hanging, but tucked away in a corner of the basement. I'd give anything if I had access to it now.) But I did get my first lesson in throwing a punch. Poppy wrapped my hands in Ace bandages and stood there bracing the solid front door of their house — made in the 1930s or '40s, back when they knew how to make a friggin' door — as I threw punch after punch to his commands of "Harder! Harder! In combination! That's all you've got? Harder!" (That I was 9 years old was of no consequence to Poppy.)
Meanwhile, my grandmother fretted: "Stop, Howard! Before he hurts himself!"
"He's not gonna hurt himself, Norma… I said, HARDER!"
(About a year or so later, at the now-deemed-youthful age of 63, Poppy died after suffering his fourth heart attack. But that evening, you'd have thought he was in his late 30s again, screaming at my uncles to quit jabbin' like girls and throw a friggin' punch.)
Anyway, that night Poppy taught me something important about throwing a punch, and I'll pass it on to you now: If ever you are called upon to do so, don't throw just any half-assed punch — square your knuckles. Make sure you absorb the shock of the punch with the entire area of the fist you're throwing. (Oh, and while I'm thinking about it: Don't tuck your thumbs under your fingers. Poppy didn't teach me that. In junior high, a kid named Ogi Lowe broke both his thumbs because he did that during a fight. It goes without saying that he never met Poppy… or anyone else who'd ever been in a fight, for that matter.)
I haven't been in a fight in a long time. But I'm a Rutherford, and I know how to throw a friggin' punch. And perhaps for that reason alone, I am happily typing this now — albeit under a precariously balanced ice pack and the influence of vodka and ibuprofen.
That said, I'd feel a lot better if I had punched an actual UPS employee Wednesday, instead of a countertop in North Hollywood.
But damn! did I ever rock the molecular structure of that countertop. Trust me — and somewhere in the afterlife, Poppy will back me up on this: on a cellular level, they're tellin' stories about the Shepcat tonight.
* Long story short: I had been chasing a package around greater Los Angeles that should have been in my hands on Monday and had to be in my hands before I left for Chicago Thursday morning.
