A WINTRY BRUSH WITH DEATH

By Rick Barna

Here’s the deal: I’ll spare you the gruesome sight of my thirteen-inch scar if you merely take a casual interest in my story. I ask that you please remain mercifully oblivious to my youthful naiveté in this tale of a snowball and a Cub Scout knife.
At my last tally, I’ve anted up more than a hundred stitches, eighty-six staples, and an internal patchwork that tenuously holds my abominable abdominals together. As a direct result of one simple act, I had to go under the knife a grand total of six times. I have been pierced by needles the size of railroad spikes, attached to tubes and wires, given knockout gas by a masked man (who might well have been an alien), then surgically sliced and skewered with a scalpel. It was then that I found out my arms were too short to spar with the entire medical profession, much less to box with the good Lord.
January, 1970. I hated that the next day would be a school day. Restless and bored, I had to escape the house, so I joined my cohorts Pete, Manuel and Cindy in front of Cindy’s place on Euclid Avenue for some Sunday evening sidewalk socializing. In a driveway on the odd-numbered side of the street lurked Gary, the Pink Panther. We were erstwhile Cub Scouts in the same den at St. Patrick’s, but even then Gary was a big-mouth show-off.
Gary had owned all the coolest Cub Scout gear: a compass, a canteen, a scout knife, the full Scout uniform, and camping gear enough to supply a whole troop. I felt lucky enough to buy the Scout manual and for my folks to afford pop and snacks when it was my turn to treat. Gary had real neat model cars and planes, but he got bent out of shape if someone played too long or had too much fun playing with his possessions. He had a really bad ten-speed; I had a big 27” Sears complete with baseball card and clothespin engine.
Now, nearly 18, he thought he was Mr. Cool with his shiny new ride - spoiled rotten, pseudo-rich. “My parents got divorced, so I got this real bitchin’ blue Barracuda – which makes me better than anyone on the whole block.” The dirty creep!
We’d show him a thing or two. We decided to fire a salvo as he backed out of his driveway, and I let fly a well-packed snowball. The air was crisp, the temperature near freezing. Our breaths were wispy, rising and vanishing into that wintry evening. His back window was the only thing I ever aimed at and actually hit.
“Who threw that?” he shouted, lowering his whiny voice, trying vainly to appear tough. I stepped slowly into the street, my arms extended.
“I did. What of it?” I shot back. I was not a bit scared, but sadly, I was unaware. For the next thing I knew, he stabbed me with his Cub Scout knife.
Surprised and off-balance, I stepped back and launched a right to his ugly mug, sending his black glasses spinning until they landed in the middle of Euclid Ave. Gary’s mother appeared on the porch like an evil queen refugee from a Grimm’s fairy tale. She cackled witchlike, “If you broke his glasses, you’re gonna pay.” Gary’s back was turned to the house the whole time, so she saw me hitting him but didn’t see the stabbing.
I could see a chunk of flesh hanging from my belly as I winced from the first stinging jabs of fear. It didn’t seem to hurt too bad; it only felt kind of warm. Was this really happening? Worse, what the hell was I gonna tell Mom? Walking home, I could still hear the echoes, “If you broke his glasses…..you’re gonna pay.”
There was nothing like this in the Cub Scout manual. I had to close the wound before the bathroom floor was drenched in blood. I could pinch the flesh together like a butterfly bandage, but first I had to disinfect the wound. Forget the iodine, where’s the Bactine? My eyes spied a Listerine bottle on the bathroom windowsill. I grabbed a washrag, drenched it with good old Listerine and applied . . . The Heat! . . .The Flames! . . . Fear reaches back, digs deep, and fires an uppercut to my guts.
Now I was really scared, getting woozy. I went back outside. How in the hell was I gonna explain this to poor Mom? I had to get reinforcements. “Pete! You got to help me explain all this to Mom. She’s never going to buy it.”
The ambulance arrived fifteen, twenty minutes later. Mom and I were sped away to St. Catherine’s to the tune of wailing sirens. Crossing the old Baltimore and Ohio Railroad tracks, I joked to the ambulance driver, “Hey! Easy on the bumps!” The last of my false bravado was spent. Poor Mom saw no humor in the evening’s turn of events and prayed silently, holding onto my hand.
Fear lay in wait, like the school bully ready to throw the haymaker. That night I was prepped for surgery, hauled shivering into an icy operating room. Soon my consciousness faded to a dull blur, then to the utter blackness of the little death.
Dr. Harvey J. Levin confided to my mom that he hadn’t seen a wound like mine since he served in Viet Nam, and that a quarter-inch or so was the difference between life and death. His tour of duty would prove to serve him well as a surgeon, and later, as a diehard Blackhawks fan and season ticket holder.
I remember buzzing the nurses’ station for my shot of the pain-killer, morphine quarter-grain. The needle didn’t scare me. After the injection, I would wait till the nurse left the room, count backwards from ten and play the game: I would sit up in my hospital bed, then slowly let go. It seemed to take an eternity in free fall before my head finally hit the pillow.
Some Cub Scout I turned out to be; I was totally unprepared for such a rude introduction to the wide world of pain. My dosage of morphine was to be administered every four hours, but the torture was that it would wear off in about three hours, leaving me in agony. I howled without the benefit of seeing a full moon. I hurt so bad and was so scared that I could not stand up on my own steam for three days.

Years later, my friend Pete mentioned being questioned by a local lawman, Det. Ostrowski who asked him why Gary had reacted so violently to a snowball. No one knew. To this day, Pete is unable to understand the Pink Panther’s mental state.
Gary had lucked out. He was tried as a minor since he was just a few weeks short of his eighteenth birthday at the time of the infamous incident on Euclid Avenue. The sorry-ass didn’t even get a haircut for the trial. He tucked his long hair up under one of his mother’s wigs, and sat smugly in the courtroom, unrepentant. His parents skated along, paying a measly $3,000.00 or so for my medical bills. “Boys will be boys!”
In our last meeting, Gary was driving the big bad blue Barracuda on my block. I saw him and stepped out into the street in front of him, arms extended. “You already stabbed me. What are you going to do now, run me over?” He threw it in reverse; our paths never crossed again. Lucky he didn’t answer my last question with the report of a small handgun.