Snow day hijinks
It was a snow day and freed from the bonds of Catholic grammar school, I took to the drifts outside our Bronx apartment building. Bundled in plaid wool and black snap boots, I labored, with occasional friend Robert, to create a makeshift igloo between the parked cars. Robert was an unpleasant child with an already storied history of violence. We dug breathlessly with our our large bladed steel shovels. I did, always have done quite a lot breathlessly. I last clearly recall standing with a heap of snow in my shovel and then Bobby swinging his shovel towards my face. My people have big noses and for that I am very grateful as if his shovel’s blade edge did not stop on the bridge of my nose. I would be more than likely have been struck blind in one eye at least. What exactly happened I have to piece together as I was not fully conscious. What is indisputable is that Bobby and that frozen day, struck me (accidentally?) in the face with a metal snow shovel and left me, blood clouding my vision in the white stuff before returning to his home for lunch. I was found, still bleeding profusely from the horizontal gash separating my nose from my face at the bridge, by a neighbor. This Samaritan carried me the five flights to our apartment. Blood stained the marble hallway marble steps, stains in dots and dashes, evident for some time after the incident. The perp, Robert’s mother, asked him where I was, as I had been invited to lunch that day, a rare treat never repeated. He responded that I didn’t want lunch, which was i suppose, true.
My parents, in a rare lapse of common sense, decided that I did not need stitches. I woke from home-bandaged sleep, blind with my blood and was rushed to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital in Manhattan. While waiting unattended, sitting in a lone chair in a hall as my parents saw to my admission, a gurney was wheeled up alongside me. On it lay a supine man-shape covered with a white sheet, peaked at one end in a modest sail. Covered that way, he should have been dead of course, except that he was clearly fidgeting and could be heard mumbling something. The corpse fidgeted so that the sheet slid away to the far side, revealing the reason for that sheet’s lapsed role at modesty. The gentleman’s forehead was festooned with a knife, handle up, blade buried. I do not remember any visible blood. As staff rushed in to re-cover and whisk away this unnatural unicorn, his mumbled, repeated message was laid bare. “Mommy, mommy, mommy, mommys” dopplered away as he was squeakily wheeled from my side. My parents, the attending nurses and doctor treated the whole affair as something that could be brushed aside as of course a person would not remember such a thing. I did and I do and was never perturbed one bit as I thought it all quite cool and could see that this was a very good story. A keeper. As for the unicorn? I have long wondered if he was calling for his mother, or identifying his assailant.
