my nose (personal myths)

as commissioned by dennisatl
i often tell this story to people
so i’ll write it here

i haven’t always had a classic italian nose.
i’ve broken it five times.
when i was about five or something
my brother and i slept on bunkbeds
i below, he above.
i remember pressing myself between the wall and the head-boards
and calling it an “elevator”
i would slide up the wall to hang out with my brother
once… while i was doing this
(or maybe it was another game? i seem to remember something about a “rollercoaster”)
i swung around from the underside of the upper bunk
and smashed my face into the lower headboard
…
i was terrible at sports as a child
Oh
but my father wanted me to play every sport
my brother
he was better
so i was a dissapointment..
i didn’t really like competition
because i always lost
Or
i won, and made other people feel bad
so sports bored me
…baseball…
i was always out in left field
my coach was pissed off that i couldn’t catch a ball
so he started doing a drill
throwing it really hard at me
telling me i had to pay attention all the time
demanding eye-contact
pay attention!
-throw the ball-
don’t dodge!
stand in front of it with your whole body and catch it with your hand!
i was bored
i was out in left field
i heard him yell my name
i turned an looked: he had thrown it fast and hard
at my face
it knocked me off my feet.
…
a few years later in football
… i don’t remember the details
just something about being tackled, crunched
my nose bleeding a lot..
…
in my early teens
i was up in Michigan with cousins
we went to a haunted house
i was in front
and my brother was behind me
— my brother has always been a big guy…
(bigger than me)
someone jumped out of a bloody bath tub roaring up a chainsaw…
(i knew it was all fake: it was a hunted house!)
the noise and the shock
sent my brother charging like a bull
slammed me into the wall
:
real blood.
…
when i lived in England when i was 17
the first family i lived with were taking sailing lessons
there was a boy a year younger than me…
my surrogate brother
we were in the boat together
it was Capsize Test day:
when the boat gets turned over: how do you right it again?
it’s on a lake: not the ocean
the wind is blowing a gale, it’s pouring down rain
they turn the boat over
we’re out in the water
detatch the sail from the boom
stand on the… (fin under the ship, that thing that holds it straight… what’s that called?)
flip it over
fall into the bottom
stay down until paul has secured the boom to the jib
i wait
cold, wet, wind
impatient
i yell
‘ PAUL! do have you secured the boom!? ‘
“YEAH!”
i sit up
the boom comes swinging across the back
and hits me in the face
nocks me out of the boat
back into the water…
so when my eyes welled up with water and the blood came out
i wasn’t sure if i was injured
or just in shock…
we waited in the National Health Hospital for hours
looking across the seats at the bleeding punks…
he said as any doctor before had
“nothing we can really do
just don’t touch it a lot
keep some cotton in there til the blood stops flowing”
…
Ever since i was about 10
i had terrible sinus infections
all the time
eventually
my mother took me to a specialist to have my sinus passages x-rayed
he decided i had infections so often because my nose had been broken a few times
and my passages weren’t straight, they were crooked and obstructed by the alignment of cartlidge and bone…
but after the boom of that boat smacked me in the face
i have hardly got a sinus infection!
however
that may more rightly be because i stopped being such a sorry hopeless desperate kid when i went to England
and then
shortly after i came back to America
i started Yoga
… learning how to breath totally changed my life
i could actually feel my sinuses changing shape when i first started yoga
my ears expanding (the eustation tubes)
the sinues opening into the throat, ears, eyes…
whole face expanding..
anyway
this little crash a few days ago didn’t break my nose
i felt the cartildge and it didn’t feel like it’d been loosened:
my eyes didn’t go black.