Fresh out of graduate school, I worked on my first ghostwriting job during the summer of 2004. The research was exceptionally engaging and allowed me the opportunity to dust off little-used past coursework like Latin, German, Roman History, and Legal Ethics. The return to my hometown allowed me to resume participation in my favorite regular basketball games around town. Saturday mornings before nine in Eastwoods Park near the UT campus, I played with a group comprised primarily of lawyers and philosophers I met through the record store.
Back at it for most of the summer, I was also in a Sunday evening game and had a couple of friends who met up during the week. A streaky jump shooter at best, I was always eager to set picks and make the extra pass. However, my natural focus had always been defensive, intending to maintain cohesion between the five positions, and feeding fast breaks off the glass. Defense consists of many habits and choices; therefore, the more aggressive we become, it follows that our decisions are less sophisticated. And in one quick down court inbounds of the ball, I would become another statistical illustration of such a notion.
Developed over years of staying engaged with the middle foreground and its periphery, my instinctual break on the ball remains frozen in time, and it would live on in infamy. I executed my play on the long pass well, the jump, and the timing, but I’d forgotten to account for my landing point somewhere along the way. The other regular game was in a nicely appointed gym; perhaps the alternating venue had my sensibilities twisted. But ultimately, there are good reasons players don’t often press full court in pick up games. After breaking up the pass, I contorted my body to avoid colliding with my opponent; as I did so, my right great toe met the concrete.
As a rookie ghostwriter at the time, I had no insurance to speak of, and therefore I did nothing to attend to the painfully jacked-up toe. I kept up with ice and taped the toe for support; years later, I would realize how futile such attempts had been. This incident was the formal conclusion of my basketball life, which had begun in the explosive aftermath of Michigan State beating Indiana State in the 1979 NCAA Championship. The game, however, has lived on within me even though my body can never play again. Watching basketball is a joyful experience as I recall the game’s lessons, especially during years where I relied on a cane to make it to the kitchen.
Nearly four years later, my knees forced me into the insurance market as they began to breakdown (https://theflashbulb.wordpress.com/2019/08/21/medical-mystery-vol-2/). Throughout this process, I lived in the upstairs apartment of a large split house, which had me up and down stairs, limping and generally putting a lot of wear and tear on my lower extremities. Between each of the knee surgeries, usually, as I was rehabbing and getting myself back into shape, that right great toe would flair up and cruelly shut me down again. When I asked my knee surgeon about the very swollen toe, she scoffed at any surgical fix and left me hopeless.
The process of becoming hobbled was one that came along in phases and delivered me just far enough from average to dislodge me from any consistent social strata. For years I was at the whim of the crumbling foundations of my poorly engineered body, but books, films, music to carry my restless mind out into the world surrounded me. Reams of paper could account for myriad false starts on my literary works, which seemed to stagnate alongside my mood.
A year after my third knee surgery, we moved into a one-story house on the Near Southside of Fort Worth. My foot only flared up a couple of times, and I was becoming more active riding my bike and shooting hoops solo a couple of times a week. But the year ended with a historically regrettable decision: walking bourbon-fueled in inappropriate footwear over a mile in the dark of night to see the live music beckoning to us on our porch. A quarter-mile into the trip, something in my foot had busted loose, and all I had was more bourbon to offset the rising tide of pain overtaking me. By the time we arrived at the venue, neither my mind nor my body could stand up, and there was quite literally nowhere to sit down. It was a long quiet, much slower trip home and seven long, painful months before I would find any relief.
My purgatory would become a podiatrist’s office in a strip mall, where I found no cure, but instead was given foam for my shoe and prescriptions to combat my body’s growing revolt. The doctor took X-rays and assured me that surgery was an option if it were necessary. But alas, when these methods fell short of improving my condition, I took my business and x-rays to an Orthopedic Surgeon specializing in foot and ankle reconstruction.
Within five minutes, my surgeon relieved me; it didn’t hurt that he carried himself with the looseness of a Big Band leader. Digital x-rays were quite the time travel from the podiatrist’s office, and as we looked at them in his spacious office, I finally saw the adversary. As we booked the upcoming procedure, he explained the truth about podiatrists, “I wish those guys wouldn’t load people up with meds like this. You know they aren’t doctors, right?” I thought mine was incompetent, but it would seem I’d fallen into a typical error loop.
The surgeon rebroke the bones and reshaped them so that the right great toe stood straight with the assistance of titanium screws after crookedly crowding its more extended neighbor for eight years. Throughout the process, I tried my best to continue covering local music. The week before I went in, I caught Loudon Wainwright at The Kessler (https://wordpress.com/post/theflashbulb.wordpress.com/45), and the week after, I had a big show booked, which I attended. It was a glorious night with a packed venue, and despite my medicated state and cane, I still found ways to dance all the same.
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