My Achilles Heel: My Ankle
By Dimitri Ehrlich
DAY ONE.
11:29AM, Tuesday October 14th
Having a fractured ankle really isn’t so bad, I think to myself, as I arrive home from the hospital. A short, manic Zionist Buddhist compulsive exercise-aholic with a penchant for 8thstreetlatinas.com and Chinese martial arts, I’ve been told more than once that mellowing out might not be a bad idea. So maybe I’ll finally get around to writing my great American novel. Maybe I’ll discover why the Chinese character for “crisis” is also the character for opportunity—or, as Homer Simpson called it, a “crisitunity.” Maybe my meditation practice, songwriting, or general demeanor will be subtly elevated.
Or maybe I’ll just sit around smoking pot and watching TV. Either way, I feel proud for not freaking out, despite the fact that I had to limp home 20 blocks from the spot near the Central Park Reservoir where my ankle snapped like a brittle twig while jogging a few hours earlier, at 6:30 in the morning. All things considered, I thought there was a certainly dignity to the way I yanked my body home, cursing and sweating, like it was someone else’s bag of lumpy, dirty laundry. Also, I must compliment myself on how well I’m adjusting to the fact that--after 20 years without missing a single working out--I will now be laid up for six weeks of constant throbbing pain.
I see a spiritual opportunity, there for the plucking, like a ripe, tumescent, slightly luminous Israeli hydroponically grown hothouse tomato, the color of the Dalai Lama’s robe. I begin to get lost in visions of taking my practice to what the Blastmaster Krs-one would have called, a whole other level.
Each time I wince, I remind myself of the Zen Buddhist phrase, “sensations arise.” This is shorthand for meditative insight into the fact that pain and pleasure are really only the arisal of neutral sensations, onto which we impute labels and projections of craving and aversion—a very nice thought, which will have do until I can get my fucking hands on some Vikies and a few martinis.
2:13PM
All in all, the day has been going pretty well. Other than the slightly-ennui inducing experience of going to a hospital by myself, and smelling those scary hospital hallways with no one to smell them with. But considering it was a trip to the hospital for X-rays, and not, say, like that time last week when a certain a balding techno artist took me to a strip club in lower Manhattan and treated me to multiple lap dances as part of some research I am doing for a “screenplay”—an evening which, by the way, was also ennui-inducing--the hospital visit was quite tolerable, even taking into account the way the angry, alcoholic, asexual loner X-Ray technician--who I got the sense spends most of his nights watching cable access TV with a loaded Walther PPK semi-automatic handgun pointed at his black and white TV, in a furnished room in Astoria--was staring at my ankle like it was a piece of chicken. Really, the only bum moment in the whole day was when my orthopedic surgeon, one Dr. Hubbard, aggressively and inexplicably grabbed the exact place where the ankle fractured, and began squeezing it while staring at me with his bulging goat eyes, asking if it hurt. The rush of sensory data, which some people might label as “pain,” tried to tear-ass to my brain through every neuron available, causing my body to shudder violently for several minutes. I considered crying, or peeing on him, (which I had done once on my pediatrician) or just mercilessly beating him with my homemade ghetto cane. But then I looked down and noticed poor Dr. Hubbard crouching my by ankles, and that he seemed already to be suffering from some terrible internal pressure in his skull that was causing both of his eyeballs to bulge like plastic ziplock bags of goldfish, slightly protruding from his face, looking like they would burst if he heard one more slightly surprising thing. I realized that had I given in to my baser impulse—which was to cane him frontier style with my homemade pimp stick—everything he had ever learned about ankles and all kinds of disturbing goo would come gushing out and mess up my one remaining good foot.
A note about my cane—I had fashioned it while in the initial phase of fury, pain, and disbelief that immediately followed the instant when my tendon, sensing it’s chance to escape, had attempted to flee the location where it was been mounted on my ankle for the last 37 years. In doing so, Dr. Hubbard explained, the tendon had yanked a shard of bone off my ankle and then gave up, causing me to crash to the ground like a paper bag full of Elmer’s glue and coat-hangers, in New Balance 991s. Once I got home and realized I couldn’t even walk across my living room, I lunged into my coat closest cursing, and tore out an oak dowel. Then I asked a friend to buy me a rubber ball from the toy store across the street, which I hacked at ineffectually with an X-acto knife, finally managing to carve a hole out of the center with a pair of pliers. I jammed the hollowed out handball onto the staff and secured it with electrical tape. After noticing that the tape was leaving a black sticky resin on my hand, I added the final touch: a dirty sock, and had what I considered a class-A pimp cane, suitable for standing on the corner for up to one entire lifetime or cracking Dr. Hubbard’s dome, whichever came first.
And so I went to bed that night feeling strangely calm about the prospect of being unable to walk or maintain my kung fu routine. Every day for the last 20 years I spent between one and three hours, engaging in a ritualistic combination of kicking, punching, jumping, kneeing, twisting, gouging and clawing exercises, designed to maim and kill up to one hundred armed opponents at once, provided you realize that the phrase “up to” clearly includes the number zero, and that I am a Jewish middle class homunculus from New Jersey who never met a supersize serving of rice, beans and shrimp garlic omellettes I didn’t like, and who carries cockroaches out of my apartment while mumbling Buddhist prayers rather than kill a bug. Now, if I am a lover not a fighter, you might well ask: But Charles, why have you spent twenty years engaging for several hours a day in really violent martial arts practices, to which I would patiently explain, What, are you my fucking therapist?
The fact is, if you were, say, a devoted runner who jogged every day for 20 years and were suddenly told you had to lay off for 6 weeks, there would, understandably be some adjustment, both psychologically and physically, in terms of giving up the endorphin rush, or runner’s high, to which all serious athletes are addicted. But if you’re a jogger, you’re not going to forget how to run in six weeks. Whereas in my case, it’s more like if you’d been obsessively practicing 25 different folk dances every day, with each movement tied to a specific inhalation or exhalation, and you had spent years fine-tuning these ancient Asian hacking and harming techniques, which unlike parmalat, are very perishable. So I was doubly burdened by the fact that my kung fu skills and street survival techniques, such as “white crane spreads its wings,” “embrace tiger, return to mountain,” and “whitey falls on the ground and bleeds to death,” which I had been sharpening for two decades, would soon be dull and flabby, and so would I.
DAY TWO
6:29AM
It’s not so bad. I woke up and my ankle looked like a grapefruit. I like to think of it not so much as having lost an ankle, as having gained a grapefruit. A big red swollen painful, throbbing grapefruit where my ankle used to be, that makes it impossible for me to walk, and which I cannot eat.
1:09PM
I have begun to actively loathe people who say, “Thing s happen for a reason.” Or, fortune cookie wisdom like, “The world is telling you to slow down.” Or those other little new age truisms like, “Sir, we will report you to the police if you cannot get it through your head that this prescription for Vicodan is not renewable.”
I know, I know: this injury is the universe’s way of telling me to slow down. It now takes me half an hour to go downstairs and get a cup of coffee. By the time I get upstairs, I need another cup of coffee. By the time I get downstairs again, I have to pee. And true, in my new slo-mo life I do have the time to notice important little things, like the fact that the mailbox on my corner is rusting. But if I wanted to move slowly, I’d drink decaf, and care about where the egrets and warblers make their nests, and I wouldn’t have moved to New York in the first place.
10:34PM
They say when you’re told you’re gonna die, the first stage reaction is often a cheery denial. As a highly developed being of light, I pride myself on not being freaked out and instead indulge myself in totally unrealistic fantasies, punctuated by forays into a miasmic, bottomless abyss of numbness, despair and foul smells such as one would associate with the bowels of Hades, of which, I would like to just point out that I smelt it and therefore cannot technically have been the one to have dealt it.
As so I lay, a lion laid low. A lion in winter. A lion with an air-cast on and six weeks ahead of him, unable to stalk and kill a single metaphoric zebra, unable to even sneak up and just sucker punch a regular zebra, which God knows those zebras have coming to them. So I lay. And lied. And laid.
No wait, I lied. Actually I couldn’t sleep.
DAY THREE.
9AM
I am ready to kill myself.
Soon, I say to myself, staring at my stubby fat face in the mirror, I shall certainly shank you. Shank you good. Shank you with this knife I made out of a sharpened spoon. Having hoisted myself on a steely petard of my own devising--namely my excessive exercise--and now inexplicably having begun talking to myself in late 70s prison lingo--I limp downstairs to the deli to gorge myself on halavah and fried eggs.
9:02AM
I have become one of those slow moving old men who smell like Vix, Grapenuts and mothballs, and who can’t quite make it across the street in the time allotted by the sign that says WALK. I have taught myself to curse at cabbies who glare at me in Pashtun, Urdu, Hindi, Greek and happily, even remembered how to say sharmouta—a useful Arabic phrase I picked up while traveling in the Levant, which translates roughly as, “your mother has sex with people she doesn’t know very well, though I ‘m not sure if she does it for financial reasons or just for fun.” It is not yet noon, and, I have nearly been run over twice. Thank God my for my rubber tipped, sock covered schtickle, Inshallah.
10:24AM
While this may be just a coincidence, I noticed this morning that when I woke up, a small patch of skin, about the size of a dime, was missing from my left elbow. At this rate I will just be a raw sack of organs and meat in about a week. Also: I have noticed that my belly button has gotten deeper. Much deeper. This morning, I think I saw a piece of lint in there, but couldn’t reach it.
My cavernous new navel may have something to do with the fact that my metabolism is accustomed to me eating about 4,000 calories a day and burning most of that off with 3- hour workouts. While I have been tremendously disciplined about avoiding my beloved workouts, I have so far still not been able to wean myself off eating 6 enormous meals a day. Even my teeth have blubber on them. Being a small, hairy, slow moving, morbidly obese beast that can curse at almost every cabbie in NY in a language they understand helps me maintain a sense of pride.
Noon:01
I unpack the bong.
3:12 PM
A “friend,” which I put in quotes only because I keep catching myself wondering what she would look like silhouetted on a balcony in St. Lucia wearing an ever so slightly see-through summer dress the color of a buttercup, calls and sends me flying into a rage. What begins as a perfectly nice phone conversation goes awry when I politely demand that she leave work and come up to massage me with Jojoba butter and administer a bubble bath while playing Joa Gilberto and wearing a tiny bikini. She says she cannot possibly, as she is busy “at her job.” And that she is “working.”
“Let me telling you something about work,” I think to my self. “Work is ME, okay, busting a double horizontal on your bizznackside.” But instead, I patiently explain: Let me dumb it down for you, honey: What part of “My fucking ankle is broken and I need you to come here immediately and shizzle my nizzle,” do you not understand?
Just to clarify, her refusal wasn’t what got my goat: I am by now used to people lacking the vision to understand the brilliant and universe-melting super-genius of my “Work.” (Aside: My work, an extremely subtle, kind of super-wry performance art, generally involves having a 17 year-old Indo-Eurasian-Serbo-Croatian-white-black-Puerto-Rican-and-Haitian-but-mainly-what-I-like-is-from-the-Zulu-nation salsa dancer-type rub coca butter on me.) No, what made my head rotate 180 degrees like Linda Blair in the Exorcist is what my friend says next: “Well,” she says, sighing that, I-just-got-back-from-my-Ashtanga-Vinyasa-yoga-class-where-I-finally-did-my-oola-tandasana-with-mulah-ukhta-bunda-shravasana-and-am-not-really-listening-to-you kind of sigh, “everything happens for a reason.”
Yeah, I think to myself, like there’s a reason you must like to get yo’ ass to’ up. But instead I just said, “Yeah, I guess you’re right,” and hung up the phone.
4:30PM
I had always considered myself a sort of impregnable evil Yiddish super-dwarf, a pocket Adonis perhaps a little past the sell-by date, but also somehow immune to the vagaries of time and ordinary people. This theory was borne out until two days ago, by the fact that, I had never broken a single bone in my body (unless you count my nose, which my friend Brian broke while we were sparring and he came down on it with the infamous northern Shaolin kung fu “monkey lunges with paw at quivering honky strike,” forgetting he had a metal bar inside his boxing glove. Or unless you also count my finger, which I broke while sparring with an awkward-moving health-nut who smelled of cumin and who always freaked me out because he worked as a court stenographer, and who jammed my middle finger half way back into my wrist with a front kick that made me plotz). Also, I have long harbored a secret pride that my bones are denser than average, and that were I to stab my fingers into you they would penetrate you like feta cheese. “This is poetic,” you say, “But beneath your beautiful visions of feta cheese and stabbing fingers, does there not lurk the ugly face of pride? “But I have no time for your convoluted questions now. I have seen my true Achilles heel. It isn’t my pride. It’s my ankle.