There is a reason they close skate parks at night.
It had taken me a good ten minutes to get the slave set up on the corner of the tabletop. Sometimes they just don’t respond worth a dam to anything you hit’em with and what the slave needs is just a good hard tap or at least a jostling of its shoe. I triggered off a frame to get my flash to blow. A piercing burst of photons illuminated the concrete contours of the Alameda skate park and my little slave flash did its job and fired and equally bright flower of light in the opposite direction. Adam, Dave and Tony had not arrived yet, so I was busy trying to sneak a couple frames of myself in. Camera timer set to a 10 count, I clipped in pedaled around and took just a roll over the tabletop to make sure my timing was good. Flash hit right on ten.
I wheeled around a bit making sure I felt on. I went up down and around the tank a couple of times and did some small jumps just to get the muscles awake. In the distance I could see two head lamps heading towards me in the night and biked out to greet Dave and Adam at the gate.
Full moon had just crested above the Port of Oakland Cranes to the south east of us, allowing a delicate blanket of blue light to fill the crater shaped park. In its planned pivots we rolled around each other, making sure not to find each other with anything but our eyes. Ready for the first attempt at a shot, I hit the timer, trigger - One and then rolled forward. Three, I’m at the edge of the tank, six, I’m at its crest, eight and I’m rolling down back towards the table top, nine and I’m beginning the launch. Ten. Flash. 11 touchdown tires to concrete, the front pulls up a little too much and I jump off the saddle holding the bike by the handlebars, walking it forward on just the back wheel. I hit the display on my Nikon and there I am, well correction there are the bottom of my wheels. Fuck jumped completely out of frame.
Dave and Adam are chit chatting on the rim of the tank as I hit the trigger for the second attempt. Instead of lessening the jump and falling through the frame, I’ve made the grave mistake of raising the stakes and the angle of the camera. Stupidity sometimes is easily measured in degrees. In this case the stupidity meter of my tripod went up about 8 and half degrees, which may seem trivial, but Euclid would probably tell you differently. Eight count and I’m flying back down toward the tabletop giving a few extra revolutions on the crank to put myself in the air at the right time. I pull up on the handlebars and have a brief moment of nighttime flight. Ten. The flash goes off all over me, even the slave lights me up from the back. I don’t get to eleven.
The next thing I know is that I don’t know. Don’t know where I am. Don’t know why I can’t breathe. Don’t know why there is snarl of metal between my legs and cold concrete cushioning my face. I don’t know most of these things, because I can’t even focus on them. When you knock the air out of yourself, you can’t really think beyond getting air, everything else in life is secondary at best
By this time Dave and Adam have yelled out, “You Ok?” Unable to suck air into my lungs immediately disqualifies me for any sort of intelligible speech, so I flounder around on the smooth ground making the faces fish make when you pull them out of water. Lips pushing in and out, eyes slightly bulging, I gurgle trying to get something to go in and then it happens, part of a lung un-sticks from itself and I can feel the suction drawing in the sea spiked night. “Aeeeirrr” is my first reply, which is followed by successive and more lucid pronunciations of the word by the time Adam and Dave are standing over me. O2 back to normal levels in my brain, my second worry becomes brokenness. I struggle a bit on the ground and don’t feel any compound fractures so flip over to my back to just let the endorphins pour over my body while I stare up into the night.
I reach up to unsnap my brain bucket (helmet) and I realize I’ve got a lot of liquid on my head. As if warm, sticky liquid on the forehead wasn’t enough for confirmation, I bring my hand away so that I can see it and yes there is a dark mess of blood now coagulating to my hand. Fuck.
I scramble to my feet, check the camera for the shot and I’m in frame. 8 degrees is all it takes. I wheel my bike over to my truck, which I was lucky enough to drive down in tonight instead of taking the ride through the Possie tube on my bike. I dig like mad for my med kit and pull it out, rip it open, looking for some butterflies. Fuck no good. I grab my rearview mirror which is sitting on the passenger seat. It fell off the window about a year ago and I haven’t really missed it. I get my first look at myself and shit there is blood everywhere and I can see the dark thick line of a split about my right brow. I dose the area with semi-sterile water from my nalgene and take another look. Its open pretty big and there is a little meat hanging out. My hopes of doing this myself just got washed away. I find some tape and attempt to make butterflies out of them, but have hard time getting them to stick, because of the blood. I jump in the driver seat and gas my way over to Oakland’s Kaiser.
If you ever want to get seen fast in an ER, you need blood. Internal bleeding will not get you seen. Much of medschool is based upon teaching future doctors to treat patients like icebergs; see surface symptoms, guess at the real size of the problem and then avoid a titanic catastrophe. A dinky little iceberg tip means nothing though to an ER receptionist. She wouldn’t know a herpes infection from a syphilis sore if it was bouncing on her chin, but luckily enough she understands blood. Luckily enough everyone understands blood.
I get to the gun detector door of the ER (I am in Oakland) and they wave me through with big eyes. By this time the blood has made its way all over my face and down my neck. The little fleshy piece sticking out of the 5cm gash is making faces at people as I step into the waiting room. The ER receptionist doesn’t even flinch, takes my card from me and immediately initiates the quickest interval from in the door to doctor that I’ve ever been apart of. The ER as usual is full, mostly with coughers, snotters and a few swollen souls. I sit for about a minute before I’m called up to the check in nurse whose does a little initial cleaning, washing away some of my blood red immediacy. I can see her settle a bit when she realizes its not a gun wound. I haven’t said anything since walking into the ER and I figure this is in my favor, because the less I talk the more people worry, the more their imaginations get the better of them and the quicker I’m going to get seen.
HMO’s are really more of self service medical dispensing machines. If you don’t know what you want, you shouldn’t throw your money into them. If however your good at figuring out your own problems, proposing solutions and like receiving meds through legal transaction routes, its really the way to go.
I fork over a crisp $50 bill along with my Kaiser card to the ER payment/insurance woman who sits behind a three inch thick wall of bullet proof glass and she tells me I need to immediately go through the door into the ward and take a left. She buzzes me through and I’m thinking, “Shit this is fastest I’ve ever been seen.” This brief moment of optimism is crushed though when I take the left and I realize that I’ve just been directed to a different waiting room, a waiting room for bleeders only. Careful not to sit to close to another bleeder and not in a chair with prior drips of crimson on it, I find a small chair near the entrance and settle in for the wait.
I can count the points in my head, the exponential decrease of endorphins in my system and the surfacing of aches and pain. One. I realize that the brow that originally just felt wet now feels sore and open. Two. The pulsing of blood vessels in areas of contact becomes apparent. Three. My shoulder feels like when I was ten and shot a 35 for the first time. Four. My hip most have also been an impact point. Five. Fuck I’ve got cuts up and down my leg that I didn’t notice before.
Forty-Five minutes later the nurse calls out “Damian” and I’m up and moving, but not as smooth as an hour ago, the joints have started a living version of rigormortis. She lays me down on the crinkly covered examination chair and does a bunch of initial wound cleaning. Nothing beats alcohol in fresh wounds, except maybe rubbing the alcohol really fast with little sterile pads. The doctor, mid-thirties with the unhealthy look of a recent medschool student peers into the gapping hole above my brow. He mumbles to himself, “looks like this has happened before.” I correct him, “No that was a soccer fight, a very one sided fight.” He offers me the options like a good vending machine. “5 stitches or Indermil Tissue Adhesive.” He goes over the pros and cons of both, without giving any overt suggestions (probably a legal issue) and I decide to embrace technology and go with the glue. Before I know it, he’s pinching my brow together with his fingers and putting human crazy glue on my laceration. It adheres almost immediately. He checks my shoulder, which seems sore, but not too bad off. “Its going to be real bad tomorrow, I think you’ve sprained it,” he says. I nod, but not to hard.
I fill out some paperwork and they let me leave. If you stay at Kaiser past midnight, the parking is free, so I make my way back to my free ride and go home.
The next morning I’m suppose to give a tour to a bunch of BERAC government people who are evaluating the JGI on safety. The director of the production sequencing line takes one look at me and sends me home.
The reason they close skate parks at night is to keep people like me out of them.
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