Heel - Heal

By popular demand, here it is… well, by three demands. At my level three requests is popularity.


I’m going to start this yarn with a little prologue… because ending with one just doesn’t seem right. What’s it called when the drummer does the three beats after a bad one liner?

I’d like to start this anecdote by raising to the foam a little lesson of passage that all men must endure. That lesson is mature manhood. At some point all of us cross a line where we see that which we committed behind us on the rambunctious side of said line, shake our heads and say, ‘oh man’, though truthfully we’re never very far from the little trouble-maker inside us. This lesson can be enlightening, cathartic, or outright painful.

Though many may think this line is the same of the passage to manhood in the traditional sexually plundering sense, ooh baby, you couldn’t be more wrong. There is a football field worth of difference between becoming a man and becoming a mature, or at least fully coherent man. On one side there is independence and the other is responsibility. Though independence is an important lesson and vital to the achievement of responsibility, it is still quite the river to cross, and usually involves both a literal and figurative blow to the independent man’s cranium.

That blow can actually occur at any part of the anatomy.


This leads me to the Tale of The Heel.

Let me first set the scene. Picture a quaint Northern Ontario town. Picture the kind of quasi-industrial picturesque place that has a Wal-Mart, but is still somewhat excited to have been bestowed a Wal-Mart, and at that Wal-Mart is a sectioned off snowmobile parking lot. Picture lakes and trees and friendly faces that are made all the more pleasing in that they are just anonymous enough that you don’t necessarily have to say hi to them.

In early August my treasured hometown is all a buzz, in that quaint small town sort of way, with a summer festival that attracts all manner of neighboring communities in for a week of carnival rides and greasy… well, everything gets kind of greasy.

This same week attracts most of my buddies from high school. We are still close and take advantage of every opportunity to shake off the burden of our impending thirties and reacquaint ourselves with the hooligans we once were. Hooliganism is one of those traits that stands on the younger side of that aforementioned line, but somehow retains a seductive power over the refined gentleman positioned on the latter half.

The hooligan in me had quite the convincing argument for me that evening.

The notorious night began as most of those reunion nights tend to, gathering at the home of one of these buddies that has found his career in our hometown, and ingesting our first few bushels of beer.

I should interject a note of the volume of alcohol consumption that we in a cold northern climate are capable and accustomed to. It becomes not only a badge of honor, but a survivalist necessity to keep the body well pickled and therefore protected and prepared for battle. I was doing my best at this point to adhere to this adage.

I could now tell a thousand funny little stories about booze and the men that love them, and the women that hate them, and the women the men want to love, and the ensuing hate affair men have with booze after the women they wanted to love are gone and replaced by the sun and a massive hangover… but lets get to the turkey of this dinner, shall we?

At the end of any given night in my hallowed hometown in the tepid days of summer, certain ceremonial rites come into play. In our continuing quest to regain or retain our youth, we can tend to engage in some activities that might seem… odd.

At this point, the male population has been split into the haves and have-nots, and I’ll let you guess what it is the haves will soon be having. The have-nots are left to forage for all-night, red-light heated slices of pizza and finding any lingering method of making the evening memorable. This tends to be where I come in.

I don’t mean to toot my own horn, though this is my website and an essay about ME, but this is usually the part of the night where I take the stage. As it happens, boy did I choose the wrong stage!

You may have inferred at this point that I usually stand with the have-nots. It is perhaps this constant membership in the have-not roster that instilled in me a need to perform and make being a have-not and getting not, not so bad.

I’ve done it all in the name of this quest. As the night winds down, I just seem to wind up, and certainly seem to get my steam. I take dares, I break things, I disrobe, I trespass, I ingest, and do just about anything to get noticed, acknowledged, and get something even though I have-not-thing.

On this particular night the performance went as such: We left the bar in a stupor I personally hadn’t stooped to in years. This was an inebriation built over six hours, all genres of alcohol, and at one point an entire tray of shots. There were four of us left, myself, The Three Toed Sloth, Primetime, and his younger brother Time Jr. Because of the summer festival mentioned earlier, there was a luxurious Recreational Vehicle on display outside the downtown bar to advertise some misbegotten festival sweepstakes for RV enthusiasts. With one look at this massive four-wheeled testament to geriatric adventure itself, I knew I had my stage.

I was up on the rooftop deck faster than a spider monkey on PCP. I looked over my people, my three friends and the droves of nightclubers, unleashed upon the night with the closing of their surrogate homes, most of whom couldn’t care less about the genius of my imminent my aria. They were right to ignore me as they sought ignorance in each other, I was probably the twelveth meathead to seek his glory on top of this moveable mountain. It wasn’t in my Edmund Hilary-like ascent of this Everest that I would find my own immortality, however…

… it would be in my dismount.

You read it right. In a moment of unbridled beer-fueled epiphany I chose the graceful way off of the oversized, nearly twenty-foot tall RV. If no one was going to respond to my show, the showman in me had to take it up a notch and drop all the jaws before with a show-stopping finish.

Imagine now my articulate, baritone inner-monologue, wiggled slightly by the influence of ‘liquid strength’. “A cartwheel… yeah, that’ll look cool! And golly, will it ever be enriching for everybody!”

Right about now you’re probably picturing a spectacularly cartoonish crash into the asphalt below, reminiscent of Wile E. Coyote’s accordion body. I hate to let you down in that respect, but no, I landed that baby. Oh boy, I landed it too well. If there were judges watching… well, judges holding numbered cards, I would have earned a ten. I landed that puppy like a lawn dart, straight up and down. The difference between me the gymnasts out there, aside from a lifetime of training, is a soft surface, not a road, and proper footwear, not crappy flip flops, which are currently serving my lifelong boycott… bloody traitors. Maybe you thought the title of this essay was in reference to my action or the substance of my character… sadly, for my foot anyway, it’s a not-so-clever ‘single entendre’.

I planted my hands just below the corner of the roof and threw my feet into the air. A spectacular aerial ballet ensued as the night wind of that eternal split-second carried me to the ground on the wings of angels… carried me and promptly dropped me like a bag expired yak fertilizer on to that unforgiving asphalt and clearly over that manhood line I talked about earlier. “Oh Man!” Though I fell from the sky I distinctly heard the sound of God or some higher power boot-fucking my ass clear through the uprights of ‘welcome to the land of grown-up consequences’. Maybe that ‘thud’ was the sound of my calcaneous (heal bone) cracking.

You could quite literally say that I broke my foot off in my own ass.

My last images of that evening, as shock and adrenaline began to mix in my blood with nine liters of alcohol and nine more of regret, are quite clear considering my state. The first among them is my good buddy Primetime and young Jr., actually thoughtfully praising my form, and as the giggling paramedics loaded me strapped down into their meat-head-wagon, was looking out at my adoring public for that last bit of recognition. Among the eyes open in wonder and ridicule staring at the car crash that was ME, there was that recognition… the Sloth… ah hell, Andrew Geden, smiling at me with that smile I tended to get after one of my showstoppers, accompanying it with a big thumbs-up.

Why did I do it? What did I hope to achieve? What did I think would happen? Though it may be difficult to believe at this point, I am a reasonable, sometimes thoughtful, marginally educated young man with a fully functioning brain. Why, after twenty-eight years on a planet with gravity and asphalt, did I think this could end any differently? All I can say with any certainty is that I didn’t think. If my synapses were firing, it was in that part of the immature male brain that leads us in to our finest, but often our dumbest moments of greatness, and is associated with words like impetuous and exuberant. The unfortunate part of the transition, the traverse across that line of devirginized manhood into actual manhood, is that I kind of liked that version of me. I’ll miss him. Three o’clock in the morning will never be the same… if it still exists at all.

'The evening began innocently enough.' Let me say at this point that if you learned anything in the preceding, beware innocent looking evenings. Beware those reunion weekends, beware friends bearing gifts and gifts bearing friends, they love, would kill for you and love to see you happy, but do you ever get into these kinds of trouble without either? Beware what you wear, on your feet and in place of your thinking cap. Lastly, beware recreational vehicles. Personally, I’ve always been suspicious.

At the time of the requests for this little bittle, a year and a half of recovery and reflection, nicknames and funny walks have passed. I am almost fully recovered, both in terms of the condition of my right hoof and the amputation of the little hooligan performer. On certain days, usually following a lot of walking or exertion, I have stiffness and discomfort to remind me of those days of blissful ignorance and the sunny side of that manhood line. To be honest, I hope it always hurts a little, I don't really want to forget. Besides, I think a little limp kind of makes me look cowboy-cool. Maybe not.

Keep those feet on the ground and... ah, whatever. Don't break your heel, it really hurts.

Patrick "Veggie Heel" Hughes