Twisted Selvage
The only sound I recall: the click-clack of his long nails like a metronome against the blacktop. He lunged at my face and just then I blocked the bite with my left arm.
I was playing at my neighbor Toby’s house one afternoon, racing my Big Wheel against his thrown-together go-kart around a track chalked onto his driveway. I don’t recall the month, but it is a safe bet it was summer because I was wearing short sleeves and shorts, both of which I’d never wear again because of all the blood. The other reason I believe it was summer was, Toby was not in my regular friend group. For starters, he was a year ahead of me in school and may have also been held back early on – he was at least five inches taller and 30 pounds heavier than me. His contraption resembled the Arkansas Chug-a-Bug from Wacky Races, driven by Lazy Luke and Blubber Bear.
Toby’s mother had called earlier that day, as she occasionally did, to invite me over to hang out with Toby in the tree fort, which was more like a bare-bones hunting platform with no sides or roof, overlooking the busy street we both lived on. Every time I sat on the platform, all three or four times, I would get itchy splinters in my butt and legs. My mom liked his mother, so she would nudge me to say yes now and again. This is another reason I believe it was summertime: during the school year I’d never go over there - I’d be busy with Billy, Gerry, Jon, Ricky, Vinny Longo – anyone else I knew took priority. In the summer months, several of my friends (and almost all my Jewish friends) were away in the Catskills at sleepaway camps. Given the choice, I would rather watch Ultra Man or Thunderbirds over spending an hour with Toby. There was only one rule when I walked onto their property, and I heard my mother recite it into the avocado green Trimline kitchen telephone that day as she confirmed that I was on my way over. “Please be sure Drummer is in the house.”
I was in 2nd grade, so perhaps I can be forgiven that I believed that everyone in town knew Drummer was bad news. He was a light-colored German Shepherd – not white, just shades of gray – but anyone who walked by would suffer the dog smashing his snarling face into the chain link fence for the duration until you were past the property, and even then, the dog continued to bark at your back for another minute. Legend had it that he ate his own poop, of which the eyes and nose understood there to be an abundance. In my section of Livingston, New Jersey, Drummer was a legendary junkyard dog. The strafed lawn, the hunting blind made from scrapwood, the debris of every prior Rube Goldberg project fabricated by Toby, that all just added to the mystique.
We sat up on the hunting stand sipping flat Pepsi poured from a 2-litre bottle into Welch’s jelly jar glasses emblazoned with Archie cartoon characters. (I always preferred my soda in cans or small bottles; those large bottles with the weird black plastic base, nobody but me twisted the cap tight enough to keep it fresh beyond the first day.) We looked down toward the mess of chalk outlining the course on which we would soon race and I spied two corners where I could drift to the right by pulling the plastic hand brake that basically froze the rear right wheel of my OG Big Wheel plastic cart. Toby said he had one final adjustment to make on his latest mashup go-kart and we descended the ladder and he began banging on a wheel with a massive pipe wrench, which seemed to me to be the wrong tool for the job. The entire property reeked of dog shit.
We started racing and despite Toby being so much bigger than me, I had cleaner starts pedaling the front wheel of my plastic trike than his old-school pedal pusher technology. His knees had no chance of fitting inside the cockpit; instead of pumping rapidly using large muscle groups, he was stuck flexing his feet repeatedly, using the minimal power his ankles could generate. Toby was something of a manchild. Following several fun races with plenty of bumper car jousting for position, a large section of my front wheel cracked open right down the centerline. It was a full blowout, the end of the race for me, no traction or control. Toby wouldn’t hear of it, saying he had duct tape in the garage, “I’ll be back in a flash!” I sat sweating in my busted ride as he flung the garage door open.
Drummer trotted out of the garage and came directly toward me, his long tongue hanging from the side of his mouth, cruising along like a ghost on a mission. The only sound I recall: the click-clack of his long nails like a metronome against the blacktop. He lunged at my face and just then I blocked the bite with my left arm. He bit down on my wrist and started doing that thing people think is cute when dogs shake their plush toys, while they egg them on saying, “Shake it! Get it, boy!” The shaking pulled me clean out of my plastic seat and Drummer dragged me across the asphalt. I think the entire event lasted less than one minute, when Toby’s mother pulled the dog off, scolding with some German or Russian commands that caused him to just sit down next to me. Perfectly compliant, like nothing had happened.
She wrapped my wrist with a yellow dish towel and ferried me quickly down the sidewalk to my house, where she told my mother what happened. I remember being in pain but also being calm – perhaps going into shock. My mother was a nurse, and she unwrapped the towel, now appearing orange, to give it a look. “It’s not so bad sweetheart,” she said. Which of course meant it was very bad, but she was a seasoned pro at keeping things cool in every manner of kid or adult trauma. She knew the swelling was going to be a problem and after a quick inspection she said to Toby’s mother that the bites hadn’t severed any arteries, so she poured some iodine on my meat hook and wrapped some gauze around my wrist and started cracking all the ice trays into a Tupperware container. Each pull of the metal device made a sound like bones being broken. With my hand submerged in ice, and no thought of seat belts, we drove up to St. Barnabas hospital. The real-life hospital where the fictional Tony Soprano convalesced and dreamed he was regular guy Kevin Finnerty, after being shot by Uncle Junior.
I grew up with a Schnauzer named Pepe. My parents got him when I was born presumably with the idea that it would distract my older brother from any ideas of snuffing me out in the crib. There are some photos of Pepe slipping through the rungs of my playpen and tearing my cloth diapers off of me – shaking and posturing like Drummer did with my arm – and my parents always said I laughed like a fool each time he did it. The Drummer incident never saddled me with a fear of canines, probably because my parents refused to make any big deal about it. When kids take a tumble, the reason they cry is because overprotective parents rush to them and coddle them, adding drama by exclaiming inflammatory language like, “Oh my God, are you okay?” If instead parents would say something sensible like, “It’s a good thing you’re so tough,” like my mother said while the doctor stitched up my mangled wrist, kids will just shrug it off. That day was the last time I set foot in Drummer’s junkyard, and I passed my mom’s low-key brilliant parenting method along to my three children. All of whom have had broken bones, received stitches – and far worse.
Years later during high school, after nothing but an occasional wave between us, I saw Toby puttering around his yard in a gas-powered go-kart, another homemade job with a lawnmower engine. Days later, my mother told me that she’d run into his mom at ShopRite and learned that Toby had lost control of his go kart, running straight into the chain link fence – the fence that kept Drummer isolated from the outside world for 14 years. The force of the impact threw him airborne, and his torso was impaled onto the sharp twisted ends atop the wire chain-link fence. Fence fabricators call those sharp tips twisted selvage.
Read my last story- Bat Day, 1972.
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