Lying and Crutches Don’t Mix

Originally published March 2005

I was born with bad knees. And by “bad knees,” I mean to the point that I once asked my parents if they requested replacement parts when putting in their order for me. And in the span of my four years of high school I had as many knee operations.

It was at a party after the second surgery that I learned boring stories get boring responses. Allow me to explain. On my first trip to the keg a stranger said, “Wow, what happened?” “Surgery,” I responded. “Oh, that sucks.” Indeed, it does.

This kind of conversation was going to make for a very tedious party. And so on my second trip to the keg another stranger asked what happened. “Windsurfing accident.” This got a much more animated response. “No sh!t?! What happened?” Uh-oh. I was not expecting follow-up questions and was, therefore, unprepared to answer them. But that didn’t stop me, and thus the snowball began to form, “Oh man, this crazy gust of wind came out of nowhere, blew my sail all to hell and I hyper-extended my knee.” Not bad. Not bad, at all.

On my third trip to the keg there was yet another unfamiliar face, but he had an all-too-familiar question. This time the extreme sport of choice was hang-gliding. A bold move considering everything I know about hang-gliding I learned from watching Wile E. Coyote. Hyper-extension still seemed to be the best diagnosis, so I spun a truly brilliant story about landing improperly and how my “rad” glider was now “toast.” Not only am I getting sympathy, I’m getting “cool” points too. This was a GREAT idea!

Fourth trip to the keg. Another stranger with the same question. Hyper-extension after a blown landing still seemed plausible and cool, but for giggles I switched up the sport. So as far as this guy was concerned, it was my first non-tandem jump in my very realistic hobby of weekend skydiving. And though it was many years ago, I do remember a rather lengthy conversation about a trip to Utah that my imaginary skydiving friends and I were planning. Skydiving in Utah? How much fun am I?

But it was on the fifth trip to the keg that I realized just how flawed this little game of mine was. Standing before me were, among others, the guys from keg trips 2–4. But my chance to make an inconspicuous getaway was thwarted by the fact that I was on crutches. So instead of going to the keg I nonchalantly hobbled past it to a group of friends, who, I might add, were hysterically aware of my deceptions. And as I crutched past I heard my whole night hit a brick wall. Must’ve been that ACME hang-glider I was using:

Guy from keg trip #4: “Sucks what happened to that girl.”

Guy from keg trip #3: “Yeah, but how cool is it that she hang-glides?”

Guy from keg trip #2: “Huh? She told me it was a windsurfing accident.”

Guy from keg trip #4: “What? Told me she was skydiving—may even miss a trip to Utah.”

Oops. Busted.

But my moment of reckoning was overtaken by vengeful karma when someone shouted the unmistakable, “5-O” (which, of course, is high school-ese for “last call”). I turned around and sure enough, the boys in blue had descended upon our little get-together. And they brought their dogs! I love dogs.

It is at this point that I should back up and say that in between trips to the keg, I was sitting inside with my leg propped up on a table while other people at the table enjoyed some herbal refreshments. Being that my cast was made up of 3 inches of cotton wrapped with 5 or 6 ace bandages—ankle to hip—it absorbed all the exhaust of the aforementioned herbal treats.

So I’m on crutches, surrounded by police and there are K-9s barking at my leg with a maniacal ferocity that should be reserved only for Stephen King movies. Then I found myself with a cop elbow-deep in my cast. I was alternately shouting for his badge number and shouting from blinding pain, all the while trying to convince him that it was not a fake cast and I was not “holding.”

Until we heard that other unmistakable high school party noise: a beer bottle being broken over someone’s head. The party now looked like the final scene from The Outsiders. There was a massive rumble brewing, and the body count would be high.

So the cops abandoned me and the next thing I knew two guys picked me up—one under each arm—and threw me into the back of a pick-up truck. Then they loaded in, and as we peeled out one of them looked at me and asked, “What happened?”

“Surgery.”