The Clumsy Compendium

Don't run before you can walk

Rattling around the echo chamber of my “bad memory” are several hollow objects that sound quite tinny. Similarly to those excellent Inside Out Pixars, it’s the most embarrassing, most disastrous, CLUMSIEST incidents that carry the most charge, that become most solidified and enduring (that ring with the highest degree of tintinnabulation) through the story of our lives. In Inside Out these incidents might be marbles at first, or eventually form massive structures like entire islands. I adored the concretizing in these movies of what may often emerge from the brain soup of existence into something more substantial: a hard, even annoying gristle that sticks in your craw for life.

On my death bed I will likely recount the weird 13 years in New York City when I was at the height (lowest point?) of my clumsiness, enduring an episodic string of trippy yarns too over the top to believe, akin in absurdity to a Quixote attacking windmills. When a normal wander across some blocks would end in a pile of garbage, a pack of dogs, a basement trapdoor, or the ER. These memories have sharp parts but maybe the more I tell them they can soften the edges with humor and grace (not grace like a ballerina—obviously—but grace like kindness) into something resembling a ball. In time it won’t even be a heavy marble but more of a beachball, something to toss on a sunny day on a bittersweet memory pile known as Clumsy Island, AKA Manhattan or Brooklyn. And maybe instead of waiting for my death bed for this telling (because who knows about the dementia), I could just suck up my shame and share them now.

Interspersed with pix from a graphic novel on a stumbling, fumbling short-lived young long distance love by Jeffrey Brown called Clumsy (2002), and in no particular order, because I couldn’t possibly try to parse this out chronologically and they all equally epically suck atomic fireballs and involve walking or running, here you go. The catalogue of my indignities for your schadenfreude delight:

LEARNING TO RUN

1. Jogging incident, the first. I would try to run here or there. When I lived in my first apartment in the city, next door to the Empire State Building, I would try to run from my home above the Gap at Macy’s/Herald Square to the East River. If this wasn’t the center of the world, I know not where. Having an edge, a riverfront park would help so I could get away from the tourist masses who would sometimes stop me in my headphoned tracks (sometimes even pulling the cord of said headphones since I looked like the only one for blocks who must live there—who else would try to jog through this shit?) to ask me where the ESB was. Right there! I pointed up to the building we were standing under at the very moment. Literally right there for godsakes I jabbed in the sky with my finger. And ran off. Kinda proud that I lived “right there” too and kinda perplexed why in the world I would want to. How in fact had I ended up right there, long story for another time. Or, when I lived on the Upper West Side for many years, and I would jog to the other boundary of this island and hightail it to the Hudson on the West Side. Or, depending on my mood, to the middle of everything in the middle of everything, Central Park—if I was feeling ambitious.

This time I ran to the river as I did before work when there was less time to work with. I ran in the morning with music which certainly added some padded oblivion to my journey, or at least the perception of padding. I was running in Riverside Park and didn’t notice (or hear) the herd of dogs (a clump of them knotted together with their leashes and big like wolves) racing to beat me. Somehow I never fall the way you should, so a herd of dogs body-bumping me from behind didn’t send me keeling forward like you might expect but careening back. Physics be damned! I was knocked to the ground, bang on the back of my head, and wasn’t quite knocked out probably because there were multiple dogs around me trying to lick and/or figure out what the heck with an owner somewhat apologizing and trying to help me up and I, I just needed to skedaddle because I was overcome by my usual level of embarrassed.

I didn’t feel great in the head, but I just thought that was the good blood rushing toward the embarrassment. I can’t remember if I was able to run home (to make this run end faster) or if I had to slow down and walk. By the time I was getting out of the shower and getting ready for work, my reflection in the mirror was split into panes of vision alternating between horizontal blocks of fuzzy and clear. Wow, the world is striped now! I thought, and somehow still thought it was a good idea to get to work. I walked the 20 blocks to upper midtown to the offices of Bookreporter.com where the freshly published books arrived all day long from every house in the city and we young 20somethings got paid pretty well (too much) for this dreamy new dot.com where we read or not read whatever we felt like. Today it turned out I didn’t feel like it. In fact, I thought it was a better idea—I couldn’t help it—to lay me down upon the rug in the boss’ back room office in her typical absence, because I could no longer sit up straight. My head hurt. I definitely felt funny. I narrated the tale of how I got run over by a pack of dogs in the park and landed back on my head rather than forward on my hands. Caring coworker Dana urged me to get back home. Where I was given homework to not-sleep. She knew it was bad to sleep with a concussion as if we were in a horror movie starring Freddy. Ah yes, must be a concussion. She called me often once I went home to lay down and not-sleep. Are you sleeping? No, not any more. Ok good, will call again soon.

2. Jogging incident two. Brooklyn now where I’m way cooler. Right? Right? There was no obvious place to run now. I was too landlocked, the river too far. Not even really a park anywhere near me that would be worthwhile. So I zigzagged along willynilly in the zone at the apex where Bushwick, Bed-Stuy, and Williamsburg came together. Hispanic, Hasidic, or Black depending which direction you walked, with me in the middle near the hospital and the McDonalds along the J train squatting in an oddly situated pink Florida-style house. I often ran west and then north through Hasidim and then Hispania because these were my stomping grounds in the environs of the bar I owned for some years. My standard route, dependent on traffic lights. I ran and navigated sidewalks and oops, there I go again, flying slow-mo through the air, clawing the sky, trying to right myself and not fall again. Again!? How I do always fall. I was angry this time. It would have just been a scratch, a big bleeding scratch on my arm, but at this point, this many years into my NYC experience, I was really starting to question my ability to navigate my way safely at all through life. I was so mad at a scratch that in my effort not to scar, I lubed the thing up daily with so much moisturizer that I turned it accidentally into a much bigger problem. It looks like a long burn now. It should have a better story. I guess that’s true. The sidewalk burned me again. Someday I would do better, and not use cream.

3. To be honest, I’m not sure if this is a walking or a running incident. I suspect I may have been walking because there’s no reason I would have been running in this area—around the eastern parts of Grand Central station, I’m not insane. But there’s too many other walking incidents down below, so let’s just round this off and call it a run. What does it matter anymore when I don’t get that far or fast before I fall? Mid-summer when the city garbage stench is at its primal peak. I remember a dark street where the sun didn’t dare to shine, dwarfed by the towering buildings around me, and sounds a cacophony of taxis, cars and garbage trucks with their mouths opening to eat the refuse. But they hadn’t yet gotten to these bags that were formerly, from another angle of the sun from another previous hour of the day, baking there like giant black steam buns. The plastic looked softened, melty. The rotten food parts inside reaching their peak. There must have been 100 full black garage bags in this towering pile. Which actually I didn’t see until I was in it. Me and the rats probably. Face plant for no reason at all (save for the one where I was probably looking up at the architecture and not down at the world largest trash pile only rivaled by the “Magic Mountain” in the Philippines my roving journalist friend Matt once wrote about so brilliantly for Harper’s before his tragic passing). I ended this journey in this soft hot stinking (magic?) mountain of trash. And for a second I just wanted to stay there and burrow in, it felt nice and safe. And so utterly gross. I got up, wiped my legs, face and chest, and ran off to my next humiliation.

LEARNING TO WALK

1. Walking incident, one. Dana and I, now true bosom buddies of the BookReporter office fiasco, enjoyed books and also the related perks of the publishing/advertising industries. We often ventured after work to some cocktail party hosted by Condé Nast with someone like George Stephanopoulos in our line of vision as we got distracted by the passing of the tray of shrimp. On this evening, I believe we had already attended a whole series of such events that week and were weary but still game to keep trucking to yet another cocktail party of course. We were going to walk uptown to my apartment to regroup and leave from there. We were probably hungover from the night before and hungry for only the kind of junk a hangover demands. I bought a hotdog from a street vendor. Then of course in mid-bite early on in the dog, I stumbled (forward this time) but instead of stopping my fall and losing the snack, I committed to holding onto the hotdog. That was my choice, not entirely conscious. It was my chin that broke the fall, and my chin that broke. Something bad had happened to the bottom of my face, it seemed by the shocked look on Dana’s face when I scampered up still holding said dirtier hotdog. The worst that happens in these incidents is the act of falling itself and then, no matter the outcome or injury, you need to exit the scene of the shame as quickly as possible as if everything’s fine. I’m fine, Ok, no problemo, I said wiping my skin and feeling wetness. Dana’s facial expression revealed it wasn’t fine. And yes I’m still going to eat that. We were pretty close to my apartment at this point. I said, let’s just get to my place as planned and I can cover it up a little with some foundation and we can continue to the party! She tried to play along and be a good sport, like yeah sure we can, fill up that chin hole with makeup. We got home and I saw my sorry chinny-chin-chin in the mirror of the apartment entry and agreed it was rough. We decided there wouldn’t be makeup enough to cover this. In fact I needed stitches. So we went to the ER at the closest hospital, a need which I never experienced in my time in NY. For all my minor mishaps, never doctors. And oh the doctors we would see!

Dana was a champ and waited with me in the lobby for many hours. We were hungry and thirsty. The hotdog was insufficient. There was no water. We had been counting on those good cocktail party wieners wrapped in puff pastry and stiff cosmos to further fuel us. Now it was just waiting and waiting. Never did she forsake me. Finally, I got called into an inner room, which I thought was great progress, but only involved more waiting, and now separated from my friend. After what seemed like many more eons, a man comes along in harlequin pants. Yes, like baggy clown patterned pants. Beggars can’t be choosers. I was thrilled to see him. He said something like, oh that looks rough, as I recounted how I fell on my face eating a hotdog, and he said “put an egg on it.” I said, wait what, I must be hallucinating, are you my doctor? And he said no, my brother’s a patient down the hall, but a raw egg on it might help for now. And he went away into the buzz of fluorescent lights down the hall toward his brother with those pants. Who was that crazy-pantsed man anyway.

Finally, along came a man who did identify himself as my doctor and at that point I really was delirious, enough to think, as this incredibly handsome young fellow was stitching my sorry ass hole face, that he was so close to me and so fine that he must really like (love!) me, in fact he was bound to ask me out and this is how we’d have that incredible meet-cute (not that it was called that back then) moment to tell our future babies about. He stitched me up and sent me on my way like a good doctor should—but where’s my new doctor boyfriend I wondered, that’s ok, he’ll find me! Then I got back to the same mirrored hallway of my apartment building and saw that the physician’s attentions only resulted in this new sort of facial hair—black pokey stitches sticking out of my chin to further announce to the world what I had done and how ridiculous I am.

2. Walking again, dear lord. You know statistics show that the most amount of car accidents happen closest to home. It’s obvious math, since that’s where you spend the most time. Frequency begets fatalities. Or in my case, walking around this city of trash and sparkling brilliance and danger-dogs and hotdogs equals falling. And the fear of falling becomes a real paralyzing thing so I’m almost forgetting how to walk at all by now. Coaching my feet on how to go step by step, watching the ground always, arms out. Nervousness breeds more nervousness, not a good look. It’s worth noting that though I certainly clocked in a large amount of drinking hours at all hours in this city that never sleeps, the memorable falling incidents (or all of them) only seem to happen during daylight when decidedly sober with the maximum amount of spectators. Like this one, walking incident two, where I was walking along a street of Brooklyn which of course had a lot of cafes and shops to window shop. I was walking close to one bar on the sidewalk, noting how there was a narrow table along the plate glass window inside with a row of happy patrons sipping there, looking out. They were seeing me seeing them when—whoopla—there she goes into the basement. One side of the metal basement trap doors were up and the other were down. That’s bad news! Death trap! So I was just walking right over the flush panel and didn’t see the opening flap until I was in it, tumbling down the stairs in front of my front row of attendees behind the plate glass. I got out ASAP and brushed myself off and hightailed down the street before anyone could make any fuss about me. I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine, practically sprinting away from their concern. I think this time I held back tears, not entirely fine.

3. Now I have a baby to protect on these mean city streets. Which are usually quite kind actually, it’s me that’s the problem. I’m the problem it’s me. I remember even when I was pregnant that I walked around harboring a floaty feeling, a secret knowing that I had something sacred in me that required protecting and no one on the streets knew about. I felt special, other, significant, mother, as early as week two. But then this inner knowledge grew visible/external when that baby became a belly that strangers wanted to touch and bless or became a full-fledged baby-baby that often was attached to me as if a parasite strapped to my chest. I don’t know why I would wear a baby on my chest necessarily when the back might be just as precarious (see: pack of dogs above and how I might fall whichever way) but Kaia in her Brooklyn-baby first year of life was indeed often in the front seat. Facing out to see and be seen. Which meant when a bus went by once someone screamed out the open window that my baby’s finger was sticking out without a mitten, oh the horror!

And then there was the time, when—you know it’s coming—I tripped on yet another crooked sidewalk that didn’t smoothly abut with the concrete slab of sidewalk next to it and oh gosh, me and the baby for fuck’s sake, and my baby’s little bald forehead is going to hit the sidewalk first. This time the people really swarmed me. Helping us up, asking if we’re ok, doling out advice in Spanglish. This time it was far beyond embarrassment, because I was mother now, and mother’s lose all ego. I became the vessel that cares for this other being, and here I was failing, falling on her. All my weight, the weight of my shame, all these accrued ignominies, falling on her delicate pink exposed forehead. She had a mark, I couldn’t pretend it didn’t happen, the red splotch was growing and would soon be a scab. I went to the doctors, who happen to work en masse in the hospital on my block. None of them wanted to hit on me—I at least knew that this time, they just wanted to help, to do their jobs. She was fine, I think. But to this day, age 17, my daughter wonders if she might have developed ADHD-Inattention because her clumsy momma splat her to the sidewalk full frontal on the face once. I don’t think it works like that, I say, as I nervously Google.

I (and then we) survived years of this in NYC. How is it that I’m still alive? No broken bones, many scars. There is absolutely no moral to this story, besides I haven’t fallen here in Sleepy Hollow, where I’ve lived since 2009. Or I mean not as often, not as visibly, not with wounds, hounds or spectators. So it must be a very good place for me to be, just the right spot. A place where my legs connect to my torso which receives commands from my brain, and the system runs well and keeps me successfully attached to the sidewalks.

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