Why is it that guys always wear pain like some fashion statement? It’s a source of pride, a bragging right. “Ouch, yeah. Feels good. I’m cool.”
I’m not speaking in the third person here — I’m as guilty as anyone. I might be worse.
This occurred to me the other day when I was working around the house, using an air-powered nail gun on something or other. I had it low to the ground, and the recoil shot the butt back into my knee like a nice swing from a sledgehammer. Ker-klunk! The pain makes your head swing big, slow arcs like a spotlight searching the heavens. And when you try to scream, only a mouse squeak that sounds like “oh mommy!” comes out.
Then I laughed. Almost tears, but definitely a laugh. A hit-your-funny-bone laugh, maniacal and twisted. How could it be funny?
Well, at least I had something to brag about the rest of the day. That made me feel better. But why are we men like this? Probably something in our genes. Too much testosterone, or coffee.
We love to brag about injuries. “You know I fell off the roof yesterday … TWICE. Landed on a bird feeder and had to go the hospital. My spleen literally popped out. It was SO cool!”
There is pride in our stupidity, in our battle wounds.
And by golly, it better scar. I remember as a kid how bad I wanted a wound serious enough to require stitches. I thought I had one once when my brother and I were embroiled in a dirt fight. He chucked a dirt chunk that had a rock in it, and it plugged me square in the shoulders, enough to break the skin. I went to the doctor, sure that I had done it this time. “Stitch me up, Doc!” I said, only to find it was barely a scratch. A scratch! That rock almost came out the other side. What kind of incompetent medicine is this! How about tetanus, at least?
It took me all the way to high school before I broke my first bone. It was during indoor soccer, which we played in the off-season. Indoor soccer is a cross between soccer and ice hockey, played on a small indoor field with walls and a green surface you could sand wood on. Like a match striker, if you slid across it, you would burst into flames.
But I loved the sport’s speed, action and ferocity, a feeding frenzy of electrical-charged kicking, chasing and checking. And it also provided the kind of injury-laden material that would one day make Homer-esque epics: “Across the battlefield I swiftly charged, the opposing army swinging wildly for my midriff, trying to dislocate my upper body from my lower, only to reattach me backwards, and upside down.”
Then the day I waited my whole life for came. Checked into a wall, my body crumpled to the ground, and my ankle rolled up like a window shade. You know it’s bad when you can feel the pain from your ankle all the way in your teeth. The swelling was immediate, and grew to the size of a bald man’s head.
I drove myself home, in a 1965 Ford Mustang without power brakes … proud of myself. I knew I had finally done it, this rite of passage. The next day I was in a cast, walking on crutches and getting to know pain pills intimately. “Hi, there. You come here often?”
It was somewhat ruined a month or so later when they re-X-rayed and proclaimed it might not have been broken at all.
“You can’t take it back,” I yelled. “That injury completes me!”
But I was never quite fulfilled. Like most men, I’ve spent the rest of my life searching for the perfect injury, the kind you can rest your hat and retire on, complete with excruciating pain that people marvel at and a scar shaped like Sammy Davis Jr.
I’ll tell my grandchildren about it, and in that sick way with a good laugh, I’ll always remember it. We certainly are a strange breed.