Some years ago, chasing my three-year-old golden retriever, Whiskey, in the Carl Schurz dog run, I slipped on the gravel and suffered what orthopaedists call a FOOSH.
A Fall On Out-Stretched Hand.
That FOOSH, ripped out all the tendons and all the gooey stuff in my right shoulder to the point where, at the time, I couldn't lift my arm to take off and put on my winter coat.
I never got the shoulder surgery I needed, of course. That would mean taking care of myself. In all my life, no one, especially not me has made me a priority. Why start now?
And besides, shoulder surgery has a recovery protocol I simply do not have the patience for. I read something about sleeping in a chair for some number of weeks. I decided the repair was worse than the pain.
Just about five years ago, my left shoulder rebelled with sympathetic arthritis. Why should it miss out on all the fun. In my inimitable Norm Crosby-Slip Mahoney-style, I used to moan that "my good shoulder hurts worser than my bad shoulder."
Anyone close to me knew exactly what I meant. And quickly ignorarated me.
Life when you're old hurts like a sonofabitch. I'm told, though not convinced, it's nevertheless better than the alternative. I haven't bought that platitude, not hook, not line, not sinker. Or stinker.
Especially as gloom descends on me with the rise of dumb and the ugly of bullying trumpdumb. Nevertheless, we're told by the relentlessly positive that we must be relentlessly positive.
They never explain why.
The other day, or night actually, at about three in the morning, I woke up in excruciating pain more pronounced than my ordinary excruciating pain. There's pain and there's pain. This was pain. A can't shake it pain like a crowbar used as a q-tip.
I had fallen asleep, finally, with my arms on my pillow, above my head, and my arthritic and torn shoulders locked up there. The pain was such that I could barely bring my arms to my down to my sides. If there were a Foley artist around when I needed him, he would have made an effect like a rusty old vault opening as I tried to ratchet down my arms. With each click of the ratchet came another wince of pain.
For whatever reason, the pain had woken me from a dream of a night fifty years earlier when I did something I seldom did when I played for the Seraperos de Saltillo in the Mexican League. I went out with a gaggle of team-mates to carouse in Torreon, or Aquacalientes, or some sad city where cervezas were served most often with knife fights.
You got cuts with your suds.
I was with Issy Buentello, our catcher and at 6'2" and 220-pounds the largest man on our team by about the measure of a middle-infielder.
"Let me tell you something, if we get into an imbroglio when we are in this bar," Issy said to me. "Where there are men, pretty girls and beer, there is often trouble.
"Let me tell you how to beat up three men at once, which more often than not are the odds against you when you drink at places where the floor is sticky and the mood is dark. There is a way to win."
I listened all the while thinking I would be better off in my small dusty hotel room watching "Hogan's Heroes" over-dubbed in Spanish.
"You take the smallest of the three men you are to fight and grab his Adam's Apple with your left hand or your right, whichever is not busy doing something else. Then apply pressure until he sounds like a fish who is going to die."
"I never much liked fish," I explained.
Issy was undeterred and continued. "You say to each of the other two men, looking each of them in the eye. I can kill your friend here in about twelve seconds. He will be my first today, but not my first ever."
"Maybe we should go to another place," I said before entering the neon and the sawdust.
"It does not matter. The entire world is in effect one bar waiting for three men to jump you. The location might change, the circumstances don't."
"So what next?" I ask. "You tell the other men to leave?"
"No," said Issy. "That is a chump's game. You and me, the entire world of sad men who go to bars like this, men and boys like you and me, we are the same. You must understand this if you are to defeat the odds.
"The man you have throated and everyone else in the place including you from el Norte and me from the rump end of a village raped by both the Spaniards and the church for half a millennia, none of these men have ever been made a priority.
"Someone else's self has always come first, someone else has always been more important. You do not go into bars like this if ever in your life you have been held and loved and loved the most by whoever is doing the loving. You only into bars like this go, if you have never been loved."
"I should feel right at home," I whispered.
"When you have the little man by his skinny pollo neck you have the two other men standing waiting to kill you, you have them lower their pants to their ankles before you remove your squeezing hands from the small man's Adam's Apple. You let them know that you and your neck-squeezing hand is the most important appendage in all the world. Do you see?
"They will say 'no' and resist the mortification, so you must harder on the neck squeeze until the small man sounds like a can of shaving creme that has run out of creme mid-shave."
At that point I was hardly shaving, but I got the idea. I coughed aloud, imitating the effect.
"When they hear that sound, the other men will lower their pants with shame. Their belt buckles with clank on the floor. When you hear that, you lift the small man up by his Adam's Apple and shove him toward his friends. Then you walk out. Staring the two mostly-undressed men in the eyes and smirking at them."
"And what if they follow you," I worried. "It's still three against one."
"Then, my friend," Issy said, "You have chosen the wrong bar."
Issy laughed a laugh that sounded like summer thunder.
We went and drank.
The cerveza was good.
But it stung going down.
Like a beer from the wrong bar that is life.
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