I once heard the great writer, Cynthia Ozick, say of Lost Illusions by Honoré de Balzac (1799-1850), “Every writer needs to read that book at a certain age.”
I’m paraphrasing. She wasn’t talking to me. We were backstage at a literary event and I had sidled up to eavesdrop on a conversation between her and George Plimpton.
I would have gotten away with it, too - they were engaged with each other and didn’t know me from Adam - if my need to impress them hadn’t made me lean in and say, “Well, I think what every writer needs, at a certain age, is a good long stay in a hospital.”
If I had to wager from the looks they gave me, they weren’t impressed. But I was just as sincere about the point I was making as Ms. Ozick was about Balzac.
Here’s why:
One summer day in 1952 - one hundred and two years after Balzac’s death and a few weeks before I started third grade - I was hit by a car while learning to ride a bicycle. My right foot got caught in the bicycle chain and chain guard, and as the car dragged me along - the old man driving it didn’t stop for half a block - it was very badly mangled.
My uncle - I was at his house playing with my cousin at the time - bolted off his porch, lifted me into the passenger seat of his 1949 Plymouth, and rushed me to Tacoma General Hospital. I remember sitting beside him, looking at my foot - which hadn’t started hurting yet - and thinking that it looked like the spaghetti & meatballs that my dog, Freckles, recently ate and then barfed up. I could see my toes and ankle, but everything in between them was more or less gone.
In the emergency room they cut off my clothes with scissors, my uncle disappeared and my parents arrived, I heard someone ask if my foot could be saved, then I was etherized or euthanized (no, that’s not the word), and woke up hours later in a chest-high cast in the children’s ward in the basement.
The chest-high cast was necessary because a good doctor had saved my foot, by performing a miraculous trick… something called “a direct skin graft.” That meant he scooped the broken tendons and ligaments and flesh out of my foot, sliced my opposite calf open like you would the belly of a salmon you were cleaning, then pulled my right foot over and sutured it to the, now hanging, flaps of that calf.
Right foot, left calf. It gave me the look of a jaunty young fellow with his legs crossed.
The idea behind the direct skin graft was that the flesh of my calf would “grow over” onto the top of my damaged foot, then be cut free from my left leg when the time was right, and I would hobble off into the world with a pound of new flesh on my foot and no flesh at all on the back my leg, a bit like Quasimodo might look had he somehow made a deal with Shylock.
Since the cast had to be chest-to-toe to keep things from moving, there also had to be three holes cut in it, two for the elimination of body wastes, and one directly over that skin graft, so the medical staff could see that the left side of my body wasn’t rejecting the right, and that gangrene had not set in.
If either of those things happened, then “snip-snip”, my foot would be separated from my ankle like a rotting avocado from its tree.
The “growing over” was supposed to take six weeks, during which time I got two penicillin shots daily, at three in the afternoon and three in the morning. I feared both shots, and I was terrified of the day nurse, whose squeaky shoes announced her coming. But I loved the night nurse, whose long hair fell onto my face when she leaned down to kiss me each 3 a.m., once the penicillin was in my body.
I swear I was awake each time.
Okay, good story, right, if maybe a little gruesome?
But why did I think it was just what the doctor ordered - ahem - to turn me into a writer?
What I would have told Ms. Ozick and Mr. Plimpton, had they not thought I was simply being a smart ass, was that, just as with my decade of solitary beach roaming, those weeks in the hospital provided the necessary “interiority,” a word I have grown to like. I would have said that while I was in my bed in the corner of that children’s ward, dozens of other kids came and went, and though I tried to make friends with them, each was gone in a day or two, leaving me alone, week in and week out, building an imaginary world inside my head, leaving me… if I’m being honest about it now, really quite bereft.
Then one day, in the ward across the hall, a boy of about my age died of asthma.
I didn’t know him, I don’t think I ever even saw him, but his father, who was a butcher, used to stick his head in my door to say ‘Hi’ whenever he visited his son. And few days after his son’s death he came again to bring me a steak, because I had told him once how much I liked them. I distinctly remember not mourning his son but being delighted with the steak, which the hospital kitchen cooked for my dinner that night, along with a baked potato.
I ate them both by myself.
Now that father is dead, and so, surely, is the nurse with the squeaky shoes and the long-haired nurse I loved. But I am alive - my foot and my leg both working fine - and I remember them.
And occasionally I do what I didn’t do seventy years ago, and truly mourn the butcher’s son.
Cynthia Ozick, as of this writing, is ninety-four and still giving us her own masterful interiority.
George Plimpton died in 2003.
What an incredible story, Richard. It always astonishes me how we can, at some point in life, remember an event and see it in a completely new and different way - and sometimes feel shame that this realisation has only just hit us.
Wow. I remember the scar. The physical one.