Some (Actual) Childhood Scars

(First draft. Will correct the usual spelling and grammar errors when I get the time.)

These are just some of my favorites........

Forehead- knife wound. Age 6
I was playing in the front yard with one of the notorious "Taylor kids". The Taylors were one of your typically redneck families that were extremely fertile and more-than-happy to populate the earth with their legions of idiot children.
Jason Taylor was a bit older than me; maybe a year or two older. We got into a fight which was rather common. It played out rather odd: I kicked his ass, he marched into his house, came back out with a large knife, and threw it from about twenty feet away.
I recall the impact knocking me to the ground. When I sat up, the warm rush of blood filled my eyes and covered my face. I blacked-out after that.
I came back to the realm of the conscious just in time to see my mother's reaction as the neighborhood kids had carried me to the front door of our house. She, of course, screamed...and out I went...again.
I came back briefly in the back of our 1980 Chevy Nova, just outside of the emergency room. It was then that I realized that I was still clutching a plastic PVC pipe/tubing. I was told that, somewhere in the mess, I had beat the mortal shit out of Jason Taylor with this pipe before dropping like a stone. I wouldn't let it go, they said.
And, my last memory of this incident was getting the anisthetic shots in the head to prepare me for sewing up. The doctor said it was "magic medicine" before injecting fire into my brain. That shit burned. After that I was rather relaxed as he sewed me up. I clearly remember the "crunch" of the needle piercing my flesh over and over again.
(If this wasn't grotesque enough, a couple of weeks later my mother decided that she would take it upon herself to remove the stitches herself. She did but it was a tad early for this as the wound was still slightly open. We went to a family reunion at Fort Supply Lake and I ended up running right into a wasp's nest in some weeds. They proceeded to sting the shit out of me, concentrating on the stab wound. Whew.)

Top of scalp- glass "shower". Age 7
This one was odd: I was playing in the cab of a junked truck; the engine and bed was missing and there were no tires. I was next to an overpass and, as I played in it, acting like I was driving, a passer-byer threw a beer bottle that smashed the windshield of my large toy, showering me with debris from both the windshield and the bottle. I had a lot of smaller cuts but the one huge gash on the top of my head turned me into a bloody mess.
It's a really thick, odd scar that is buried in my bushel of hair

Right knee- large, rusty nail gash. Age 8.
I was riding my bike in Bill Still's trailer park in Ninnekah, Oklahoma. (None of you lame-ass, east-end, hardcore-turned-emo-turned-country guys are permitted to steal that line.) Kids do the damndest things but poor, redneck kids do the dumbest and crziest things: I had stacked piles and piles of old lumber to jump my bike over. I would make a jump, then up the anty- pile it higher and higher. I even had some beat up old caution cones for theatrics...
And, of course, it got ridiculous. Too big, too much, too tall. I wiped out on a jump and landed in a pile of lumber, full of rusty nails. It's a minor miracle that I ONLY suffered the huge goddamn gash on my knee that I received that day.
I limped inside and was greeted by our babysitter at the time, an ancient, evil bitch-beast named Doris. She was scared that my father would be upset with her and told me to hide the wound.
It may sound crazy but she was a pretty abusive lady and I was scared of her...so I did what she said. This meant no tetnis, no stitches, and many, many weeks of agony. Somehow it healed.
It's far and away the largest scar I own.


Left, inside-elbow- dog-bite. Age 10
I believe I have written about this before so I shall make it as short as possible...
My father was taking me to meet the new sponsor for his race car. I believe my instructions were simple for that evening: DON'T FUCK UP.
We met Tom at his garage and they began their usual dialogue about cars that guaranteed hours of boredom for me.
I began to explore. It was an auto repair shop so there wasn't much to see except maybe a Snap-On bikini calendar and...that's about it.
Dad called me over to meet Tom's dog. She was a rottweiler and had a young pup. The dog knew dad pretty well and was friendly to him. He called me over to pet her and, with a very quick snap, she grabbed my arm with a huge bite.
She let go pretty quickly and I fell back a bit- noticing the two gaping holes in my arm, the streams of blood, and...uugghh...two sagging knobs of fat that had been pulled out of my arm upon the dog's release.
About as quickly as the dog released me, I grabbed the nearest weapon I could find: a large pipe wrench. I gave the dog one solid WHACK over the head and she went out like a light.
It was a chorus of screams: I screamed at my massacred arm, Tom screamed at a pending lawsuit and his dog that was likely DEAD from a fatal beating with a blunt object, and dad yelled (not much of a screamer, the old man)...as he knew that the sponsorship was OVER.
I don't remember much of the in-between but the dog recovered. I recovered. It was all pretty uncomfortable but I recall Tom (always drunk) looking at my arm and trying to tell me that the large holes in my arm was no big deal.
It was a quiet drive home...but dad began to laugh about it at some point. It was all pretty unbelievable.
This was 1988 and he bought me Michael Jackson's "Bad" as an apology. (He felt bad.)

Left hand- rusty knife, age 10.
I was playing at a babysitter's house outside of Cement, Oklahoma. I remember the incident quite well: Dwight Yoakam's version of "Little Sister" was on the radio as the babysitter, a large woman named Ella (or "The Big E" as my father called her), sang along.
Boredom makes a boy do crazy things. I found a rusty knife and a platic toy boat. I decided to dismantle the toy with the knife. I raised the knife to break through the thick platic only to have the rusty blade slide through my fingers upon impact. Again, I was treated to a ton of blood and the stuffin's from my chubby fingers made me instantly sick as I watched it dangle from my hand- shaking and dripping red.
Ella bandaged it up and thought it was no big deal. This was one of those phases where my mother had blown back into our lives and she came to pick me up. Upon discovering the wound she saw it was pretty bad.
We went to the ER and I got the usual treatment(got a tetnis this time) and discovered that I had severed the tendon and would require surgery.
I had the surgery and it reduced my pinky finger to a worthless shrimp of a member; it doesn't bend very much and won't straighten. It is mostly scar tissue and it doesn't get much blood so it gets very cold very easily.
I always blame this finger on my terribly sloppy guitar playing.
"I coulda' been a guitar genius but, ya' know, I got this gimp finger..."

OK. I am going to stop. This has gotten really long.