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It Pays to Use Your Head |
by Kevin Risner
I liked starting at an early age. The scene took place in my grandparents' backyard, which stretched just over a half-acre with numerous trees dotting the landscape. My brother, sister, and I were chasing each other, playing some kind of primitive version of tag—at least that's what my fazed brain spins for me.
Almost as if on cue, my brother began to run after me, no doubt ready to pull some wrestling move on me, something he was known well for during my childhood. I naturally feared for my life, being the lowly age of four. I dashed off with my wimpy legs. My brother called out to me, shouting out something I could not hear, maybe that I'd be the first one caught; I blasted forward without thinking about anything around me, only to get as far away as possible from him and as fast as I could.
Thunk!
Next thing, there were people peering down at me. My parents. My brother. Other strangers that I'd never met before in my life. All of them towered over me like sequoias. I heard a fuzz of voices, but I couldn't catch anything coherent. It's like when you tune a radio station and you only hear the white noise and a faint hint of a voice buried under it somewhere, maybe at the station you want but can't quite get to.
Soon it became apparent that I had been sleeping. I slowly rose up, still seated, and saw an ambulance parked in the driveway. My father gave me a relieved look, and my mother wiped her eyes. They informed me I had been out cold for a while.
"Why?"
A few people pointed over to the backyard. There it stood. A tree. A stupid, fat, maple tree close to my grandparents' house. It remained rooted there like a goalkeeper, denying me passage. I, of course, did not see it at the time. I was too busy running from my brother to see it standing there waiting. That tree is not at my grandparents' house any longer; it received an early death because it kept threatening the well-being of the back-end of the house. Down it went. It withstood my collision, but it could not get past the saw.
I'm surprised my brain functionality did not falter after that incident. Surely that momentous of an impact could do at least a little bit of damage, yes? Well, years passed, and I was lucky enough to receive only a few bumps to the noggin; in retrospect, I caused a few injuries on others, usually with a baseball bat and careless swinging. What I lacked in talent on the baseball diamond, I made up for in inflicting pain on others.
So, yes, I managed to scrape by with little damage to my precious brain.
At times, I felt like installing pipes throughout my house, low-hanging ones that traveled through walls and crossed thresholds at a very low berth, just to toy with the possibility of smacking my forehead against it, just to recall the feeling, whatever it was, that I had at the age of four.
Then I decided to live outside the United States for a year.
It's Sunday. It's May. It's a normal work day for me in Istanbul. My weekends were not the normally designated weekend days; Monday and Tuesday were the times when I had off. So, Sunday usually turned out to be the most exciting day for me, 7:00 when I finish. Only eight hours of teaching before I could relax in the soon-to-be scalding summer sun of the city.
My afternoon class loomed ahead. I had the basic gist of the lesson planned that day, but I needed some filler, a writing exercise that tied in with the grammar and the reading. I was not having much luck though with my resources. I pulled open the cabinets in the teacher's room, hoping for something to fly at me as if by magic. I held the closet overhead cabinet open and pulled down a book.
The material inside had boring prompts that I had done before in class: Write about how traffic in your city is. Tell me about your perfect vacation spot. If you could meet one celebrity, who would it be and why? Pinning this particular book as a bad job, I stood up from my seat quickly to place it back on the shelf.
Thunk!
It just so happened that the long table where I had been sitting was situated beneath the cabinets. The open doors were right above me. My crown and one of the cabinet corners made contact; and this wasn't a brush or a faint bump, it was a full-on, battering-ram of a smack. With tears streaming from the blow, I collapsed onto my chair with my right hand clasped over the site of impact. My curse of pain roused my fellow teacher, Greg, and my headteacher, Ryan, from their own lesson planning.
"Are you all right?" Greg asked as he peered up from an ancient grammar workbook.
"I'm fine, just bumped my head."
"You hit the corner," Ryan said. "Are you bleeding?"
"No."
I lowered the hand that had been clutching the top of my head. Red. The entire palm of my hand was red, red with my blood.
"Umm, actually, I was lying. I am bleeding."
"You are? Is it bad?"
Ryan leapt up as if I had just told him about a terrorist attack on the city. His eyes grew bigger than pomegranates and his curly hair flew every which way.
"It's bleeding a bit."
"We need to find a clinic."
I shook my head then stopped quickly, afraid that blood might splatter Greg's white shirt or anything else in close proximity.
"I just need some gauze or paper towels..."
"Zafer!"
Ryan tended to overreact about the things that weren't that big of a deal. Greg and I both have realized in the past not to mention anything of gargantuan importance—even offhandedly—without being ready with earplugs or a mode of transport away from the resulting freak-out.
So I was not surprised by Ryan's reaction, but I remained exasperated.
"I'm fine. I just need to—"
"Are you dizzy?"
"No."
"Faint?"
"No."
"Let me see it."
I didn't want the wound to turn into a geyser if I lessened the pressure, but Ryan was insistent. I quickly gave him a peek, as if it would be improper to let Greg to see such carnage.
"You might need stitches."
"I don't think it's that big of an—"
"Oi! Zafer!"
Zafer, one of the educational advisors, came into view from the main office and looked at the scene: Greg sitting with the book on his lap opened to an exercise on the perfect tense, Ryan with a paternal hand on my shoulder, and my own hand clasped over my head as if holding my brains inside.
"We need to find a clinic, Zafer."
"What is the matter?"
"Can't we just go to a pharmacy?" I asked.
"Kevin hurt his head, Zafer."
I sighed. I just wanted someone to run up to the men's restroom and bring down a pile of paper towels to stem the flow of blood. I could feel the blood beginning to seep out of my cupped hand.
"Pharmacy," I mumbled again.
"Yes, the eczane is a good idea."
"Zafer, you come with us. Show us the nearest one."
Ryan led me out of the room. I wanted paper towels first, but we didn't stop in the bathroom to get them. The three of us left Greg and headed out into the busy Kadıköy main street to find a place where I could be fixed up before I had to teach.
We made a left, weaving around people, no rhyme or reason to the flow of pedestrian traffic. Chaos swirled around me. I began to feel a bit light-headed in the baking sun. The words ECZANE in green jutted out from an entranceway to our right, and we took it into the pharmacy.
The first interview.
Zafer talked with the pharmacists in rapid Turkish, Ryan interjecting here and there with the Turkish he knew. I stood to the side, still holding my head for fear of it cracking in two if I let go. We soon were ushered out of the place, all the experts insisting I head to the clinic for stitches. It would be on the street adjacent to the waterfront, they told us. Nothing gauze-like to take the place of my hand, however. I kept on bleeding.
We trudged to the ferry docks and cut a left at the traffic-jammed street. The location of the clinic proved evasive, at least to me. Not to Zafer. He stood in front of a wall, which—had it not been Sunday—would not be a wall, but a throughway.
The clinic, conveniently, was not open on this particular day.
I began to feel like Jesus after the crown of thorns was thrust on his head. I turned to the mirrored wall and got that very same confirmation as blood intermingled with the sweat on my brow. I was growing worried.
"Ryan, we really need to fix this up. Let's just get to a pharmacy and be done with it. Just clean me up with no stitches."
I was fine with no stitches. Let it not be here in Istanbul that I have to get my first sewing up.
Luckily, another ECZANE sign became visible. The three of us rushed into it and demanded my head be given an actual inspection by the main pharmacist. This resulted in a thorough washing of my scalp, at least where the injury was. After the bleeding slowed down, the pharmacist decided that stitches wouldn't be necessary. An antiseptic was all that needed to be administered. He opened a bottle the size of a golf ball and dabbed a cotton swab with the substance. It stung as it came in contact with my injury.
It worked like magic. I almost felt at ease now. I took the bottle and thanked everyone there. I also promised with crossed fingers not to shower for three days until the wound closed. That sort of fast was not a smart plan, especially as it was unseasonably hot in Istanbul at the moment.
Ryan and Zafer led me back to our branch on the main street, now five minutes after the start of class.
"It's not a problem," Ryan insisted. "Zafer notified everyone before we left that we might be late—"
Zafer was indeed ahead of us gabbing on the phone to one of the office staff, no doubt about my condition.
"But—"
"Just go upstairs to your classroom and everything will run smoothly."
I still had not finished preparing for my lesson. I was unable to throw in another word; I took my books and dashed into the classroom.
The class was an immense success, to be honest. I used the incident as a springboard for a discussion about childhood injuries, then a writing exercise about the worst injury they had ever experienced. So I managed to get a decent discussion and topic for the class. It came at a price and a few lost brain cells. But I did it.
So you would think I would err on the side of caution from now on. No more head injuries. I simply couldn't disappoint you, though! Only three months later, I was walking back to my apartment in the Moda district of Istanbul. I took the normal route down an alleyway that went slightly uphill, past a corner market. For some reason, I was brushing close against the building to my right and looking down, most likely at a stray cat.
Thunk!
Another corner found me. This time it was a ventilation system, a large beige-colored box that also served the purpose of measuring the amount of electricity that apartment gave off. On instinct, I clasped my head and dashed back to my apartment. It was only a two-minute walk there but I could feel a river sliding through my fingers as I turned down my street. The number of people wasn't large, but I did not want anyone to stop me and pipe up suggestions in Turkish on how to cauterize this wound.
Bypassing my housemate Julian, I made a beeline for the bathroom and used the remaining antiseptic on it. The wound did not seem as large or deep as the one I had in May, but it still bled like mad. I was incensed. How could I be so stupid? How could I let this happen again? A second major head injury involving splitting open a stretch of skin! I was growing unlucky.
My heart began to beat very fast. Did someone possess a voodoo doll? Was karma beginning to nibble at the crevices of my brain? There seemed to be something out there that wanted my cranium perforated.
I would not let it happen again! I vowed. I vowed to be careful. I would wear a helmet, a cool one that you would see on a cyclist at the Tour de France. I would force my eyeballs to look upward; I would befriend someone 7-feet tall. Or just have my pal Greg walk next to me, so that I would be aware of any low overhangs on the horizon.
I should have held close to my promises.
I traveled to Cappadocia with my sister in September. She is four inches shorter than I. And as we went to view some underground churches, I ascended a flight of steps to get into one of the caves. And, what do you know, thunk, I scraped my head against an overhanging rock.
Now I replace my helmets weekly; I make sure the showerhead is two feet over me at all times, detachable if possible, no matter where I go. I duck under overpasses on the highway in my car. I crouch in a ball if there's the slightest hint of a hailstorm in the distance.
I've even tried to write letters to famous tall people, to see if they might help me out and accompany me everywhere. No dice yet on that. But I'm ready. No more injuries. No more—
Thunk!
Kevin Risner's background in writing has included doing so for both his college's newspapers and also blogging on multiple sites since 2003. He also has spent just under two years teaching in Istanbul. Like Carmen Sandiego, his location is rarely set in one particular place, so pinning a current one is normally quite difficult.
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