Gabby_ A Story of Courage and Hope - Alison Hanson [31]
Warnings didn’t have much impact, however. Our group of friends was incorrigible. When we were young, the Good Humor guy would drive his ice cream truck down our street on summer afternoons. Eventually, though, after being pelted with half-eaten ice cream, he wised up and never returned. We’d hear the tinkling music from his truck on the block before ours and the block after ours, but he knew better than to venture down our stretch of Greenwood Avenue.
I’m lucky I lived through my childhood, because I was the most injury-prone kid in West Orange.
My brother and I shared a crib, and I broke my jaw falling out of it. My brother claims he pushed me. Sounds likely. Other injuries were due to my own stupidity or bullheadedness.
When Scott and I were in kindergarten, my mother asked us to put a letter in the mailbox across the street. “Make sure you cross at the corner,” she told us. We were usually pretty obstinate, but on this particular day, my brother decided to listen to her. He walked toward the corner. Me, I walked straight across the street, between two parked cars, and got nailed by a passing motorist. I went flying through the air and woke up in the hospital, throwing up from a bad concussion.
When I was twelve, my friend Tommy dropped a jar of worms while we were fishing. I stepped on it and got worm guts, glass, and dirt in my foot. I was in the hospital for a week with blood poisoning.
Another time, Tommy’s cousin shot me in the foot with a pellet gun. The doctor recommended just leaving the pellet in there, but my mother wanted it out. So this surgeon started cutting where the hole was and he wound up taking my foot halfway off trying to find the damn pellet. I ended up with nerve damage. When I woke up after surgery I heard the doctor saying, “I don’t know if he’ll be able to walk right anymore.”
In ninth grade, I broke my knuckles in a fight. That taught me a lesson: Don’t punch someone as hard as you can, because it’s going to break your knuckles.
There are more injuries to recount, but I’ll stop here.
I guess I had a habit of coming out swinging in part because I was the son of a hard-charging, hard-drinking, hardworking Jersey detective. Every year or so, my dad would come home with a cast on his right hand. Working the narcotics unit, he had to use his fists a lot, he’d say. I assumed there were a few bar fights thrown in there, too.
Neither my mom nor my dad went to college, but they both had PhDs in street smarts, and Scott and I were proud of them. As the sons of career police officers, we grew up knowing what it meant to serve the public and to put your life on the line. We also saw how crazy a calling police work could be.
When we were five years old, my father would take us to this particular playground and push us on the swings. We didn’t know it, but he picked that playground so he could stake out a nearby house. He needed evidence to obtain a search warrant and we were his cover. “Just keep swinging, boys,” he’d say, with one eye on us and the other on the house.
My dad was a cop who had his own special tool kit. He’d be interrogating some nitwit, and he’d have the guy put his right hand on the police-station photocopier. “This is our lie-detector machine,” he’d say sternly, and the sort of degenerates he dealt with wouldn’t know any better. My father would ask a leading question, and if he didn’t like the answer, he’d hit the “print” button. “The machine says you’re lying!” he’d bark. Such creativity often led to confessions, and helped my father rise to the rank of captain.
My father could be equally audacious on the home front. Gabby’s father toughened up his daughters by sending them to that Mexican summer camp where no one knew English. That was easy! My father toughened up Scott and me by sending us into shark-infested waters.
We did a lot of boating as boys, and one day when we were about fifteen years old, we were out with my father in New Jersey’s Barnegat Bay. We ran aground on a sandbar, and making things