by Robert Hoge
At step twelve I planted my right hand down on one of the playing cards strewn across the stage by the previous act. It slid across the floor and I started to fall forward. I decided I’d made it far enough. I flung my legs back and came down from the handstand fast enough for it to look like it had all been planned that way. I turned and looked at the audience.
Silence for a few seconds. Then everyone broke into applause and loud cheering. I sat there on the stage for a few seconds, enjoying the moment.
At the end we voted on which hut had given the best performance, and the kids gave due consideration to the juggling acts, the joke-tellers, the card tricks, and me.
And we won. We weren’t showered with trophies or prize money, but we did each receive a chocolate bar, which was even better, as far as I was concerned. Maybe taking my legs off wasn’t that much of a big deal after all.
I enjoyed a kind of grudging respect for a few weeks after that, but the name-callings of cripple and Toe Nose eventually found their way back to the playground.
Then my parents told me they had a plan that might just help change everything.
17
Planning for Pretty
One Saturday morning after cartoons and Corn Flakes my parents sat me down at our kitchen table and told me about a new operation the doctors had planned.
“The doctors want to do some more work on your face,” Mom said.
“Okay,” I said.
“Now that you’re older, the doctors have an opportunity to work out what you might look like as an adult,” she continued. “They can make some small adjustments that they think might have a big impact on how you look.”
I nodded.
“And in another three or four years, they’ll need to do further surgery that will make you look a lot more normal,” she said.
Dad looked up from drinking his cup of tea.
“The doctors say they need to do this operation to prepare for that big one,” he said.
“Okay,” I said again.
I still had plenty of medical appointments. There was the orthodontist to see, and I needed new legs made every nine months or so as I outgrew them. But it had been years since I’d had an operation.
I’d spent so much time at the hospital that up until I was about twelve, I had the largest single file of any patient at Mater Children’s Hospital. Ever. Then, either because I was getting too big a head about it or it was too bulky to actually file, or because it was too heavy to carry around anymore, the hospital split my file in two. I was a bit annoyed about it. All those appointments and operations, all the time spent sitting and waiting—and the one major achievement I had to show for it was being taken away. Somehow I’d fancied myself getting an entry in the Guinness Book of World Records someday. “Largest hospital file on record: Mr. Robert Hoge of Brisbane, Australia, with a file two thousand pages long and weighing in at eleven pounds.” Then I was robbed by a technicality.
Detailed memories of my operations had faded. I was left with vague memories of the cold smell of antiseptic and ammonia, and bright surgery lights burning into my eyes as I counted backward from ten. I’d been too young when I had my big operations to remember the before-versus-after, the dramatic transformation. No, the memories I had were of the pain from being cut open, chopped up, and sewn back together.
My parents went on to explain the operation in detail. The doctors were going to remove a chunk of cartilage from one of my right ribs and use it to rebuild my face, they said. Cartilage isn’t as strong as bone, but it can be easily shaped.
“Will it hurt?” I asked.
Mom wavered for a second.
“No operation is ever easy, Robert,” Dad said. “You know that. But it’s for the best.”
They talked for a bit longer, told me more about what was involved. At no stage did they ask me whether the operation should be done. I don’t know what I would have said. Instead, they asked whether I understood.
“Yes,” I said.
The surgical team scheduled the operation for the last week of grade five, so I would be well and truly recovered for Christmas, which falls in the Australian summer, just after the end of the school year.
One lunchtime I sat chewing a ham and cheese sandwich and talked about the operation with one of my classmates, Matthew.
“Maybe no one will recognize you when you come back to school next year,” Matthew said.
I hadn’t even thought about that. My parents had mostly talked about minor changes.
“Maybe,” I said.
“But if they’re going to do a big operation, they’ll have to improve how you look.”
I shrugged, but it sounded like a good plan to me. My face was still a changing canvas, painted on, and over, by everyone except me. Every time I looked in the mirror I was reminded not only of just how far from normal I was but how little ownership I had of my face. I started to wonder just how much they could do with the operation. Maybe they’d fix the dents in the sides of my head, or make my nose look a little less squished. Perhaps they would smooth out some of my bumps and make me look not quite so Robert-like. Maybe after the operation kids wouldn’t call me names so much.
The more I thought about the operation, the more I wondered how much difference it would make to how I looked. My parents kept saying it was only a small thing, but as the big day got closer and closer I couldn’t stop thinking about it.
Finally it was time to head to the hospital. I’d had so many operations, the routine was still familiar. My parents would pack a few clothes into a bag. I’d add some toys and some books. We’d hop in the car and take the drive to Mater, where I’d be admitted and see some familiar old faces and lots of new ones. I’d usually come in a day or two before the procedure so doctors could check me out and make sure I was fine to be operated on.
After I was admitted, I settled into my usual bed, said good-bye to my parents for the night, and thought about how different I might look in just a few days.
Next morning it was showtime!
Morning operations were the best, because you weren’t allowed to eat for hours and hours beforehand. Having an operation in the late afternoon meant having to skip breakfast and lunch.
I couldn’t eat food, but I snuck a small sip of water from Mom and she sat beside my bed and read books to me while we waited. Eventually a nurse came and said it was time to get ready. I changed out of my pajamas and into a special gown. Then I was wheeled into surgery. I waited outside for a few minutes, where I was given an injection that made me sleepy.
Then I said good-bye to Mom and Dad and was wheeled through two big doors. The operating room smelled like a super-clean bathroom and was just as bright. It was full of odd machines and doctors and nurses in masks and gowns. I would have panicked, but the injection was already starting to make me feel groggy.
When I reached the center of the room, one of the doctors put a mask over my face and asked me to count backward from ten.
“Ten,” I said.
All I could see above me were four bright lights. The lights pulsed like an octopus slowly opening its tentacles.
“Nine,” I said. It was getting darker. The tentacles were getting ready to wrap around me. “Eight.” Almost covering me now. “Seven.”
Then I was unconscious. Claimed by the dark. The surgery took several hours. The team removed some cartilage from my ribs and partially rebuilt the bridge of my nose. They used leftover pieces to smooth out some other small gaps and bumps in my face and prepared it for the next operation in a few years. That would be the big one, the one that would make me look more normal.
A few days after the operation, the doctors were ready to take off the bandages. My parents were with me as they slowly unwrapped my head. They said I would be puffy and bruised, that it would take a while before we could see the differences. When I looked at my face in the mirro
r, the first thing I saw was my nose—big and bulbous. The same as it had always been. I couldn’t see any change. My face was still just my face. I’d hoped to return to school after the holidays as a stranger, making my classmates wonder who the new kid was. That wasn’t going to happen.
As part of the operation, I had splints stuck in my nose. A few weeks later they were due to be taken out. We arrived at the hospital midmorning for what should have been a simple procedure, but when the doctors tried to remove the splints they discovered tissue had grown around them.
Actually, I was the one who discovered it when they first tried to remove them.
The doctors had squeezed the top of my nose and gently tried to work the first splint loose. Pain shot through my nose and across my cheeks. It was like they were cutting my face open from the inside out. I screamed so loudly that Mom couldn’t take it and had to go outside. Dad stayed with me and winced with my every scream as they tried again and again. One way or another, the splints had to come out. The longer they remained in, the more tissue would grow.
The doctors and nurses conferred in the corridor for a minute and decided they would put me under general anesthetic and remove the splints that way. Easy. Except I didn’t want any of that. I was always ill after a general anesthetic and didn’t want to brave the dark octopus again. After years of doing what I was told, I decided I’d take a stand.
I looked at Dad. “I don’t want to go under general anesthetic,” I told him.
“You sure?” Dad asked.
I nodded. “Let’s just get it done,” I said.
The doctors looked at Dad and he nodded. I tensed up as the doctors tried again. The pain was as bad as anything I’d ever felt in my life. But I bit down on my tongue and closed my eyes and tried not to scream as they pulled out the splints along with the tissue that had grown over them. Blood poured out of my nose and I almost blacked out. But it was done.
• • •
Sixth grade was much the same as fifth—games in the playground, unsuccessfully searching for a sport to play—until our elementary school rugby league coach, Mr. McConnell, let me help out “coaching.” Teams would square off when trials were under way and he’d watch to see how well various kids played. I walked alongside and took tallies of which players were making tackles and which kids were making big runs. Every now and then someone would come up to me and whisper, “Hey, Robert, put me down for a couple of extra tackles, would you?” For the kids I liked, I did.
That year we had the great spitball war of 1983. It started innocently, with a few boys removing the inside of their pens and screwing up pieces of paper to shoot at the ceiling. It rapidly escalated to a full-scale war. I tried to stay out of it, but two of the major combatants sat right behind me and I was quickly dragged in. We soon graduated to pieces of paper that were rolled up and chewed until they were sticky with spit, then shot out of a pen like cannonballs. The war lasted only a few days before we were found out and almost the entire class got a week’s lunchtime detention that we spent not licking spit off the ground, but scraping spitballs off the wall. If we were tall enough, I bet they would have made us do the ceiling too.
18
Green Is Good
By the time I turned twelve and reached grade eight, I’d given up on the idea of playing a competitive team sport.
In high school, organized interschool sports moved from Friday afternoons to Saturdays. But we didn’t escape compulsory sports altogether. On Tuesday afternoons we had to do what the school called “health and leisure activities.”
At the start of the year we were offered a range of options. I gave it as little thought as possible and chose lawn bowls, a game I’d never played before. I had little idea what it really involved, but at least it had to be better than the made-up misfit sports we had to play in elementary school.
On the first Tuesday we rolled up to the Wynnum Ex-Services Bowls Club, located on the waterfront next to the local dump. Dad and I would go to the dump every now and then, and he’d let me scavenge for treasure—junk-hunting by the bay.
The objective of lawn bowls was simple. Players rolled their bowl—a heavy ball you could just barely hold in one hand—so that it ended up as close as possible to a smaller white ball, called the jack. This was slightly complicated by the fact that the bowls were designed to curve as they rolled.
Games were played on a grass field that was meticulously leveled and maintained so bowls could roll smoothly. Each green was divided into playing strips about 5 yards wide and 32 yards long. Players would stand at one end and roll their bowls toward the jack at the far end. You scored points by having your bowl end up closer to the jack than your opponents’ bowls after they’d all been rolled.
The game had been around for centuries and had even been banned by an English king in the 1300s because too many people were playing it and neglecting their archery training. As we hopped off our bus, I started to wonder if the old men waiting to help teach us had originally taken up the sport as soon as the ban was lifted. At that time, lawn bowls was seen as a sport for older people, and all the volunteers that day were in their sixties and seventies. They were happy to talk to us young kids and get us on our way to our first game of bowls.
Balance was the first problem I encountered. Normally players would bend both knees and step forward as they released the bowl. My left leg had no knee, so that approach wasn’t going to work for me. Instead, I stretched it out to the side and placed my left hand on the ground for extra support. This made it difficult to look up, and most of the time, instead of looking at the jack, I looked down at the ground. I wasn’t much good to begin with, but I felt I understood what I had to do to get the bowl where it needed to go, at least in theory.
We had a volunteer who taught us the basics, and then we spent another half hour playing in teams. I was captain and was competing against a kid named Shaun Luck. Shaun was bright, smart, and quick-witted. He was the first kid in the class to be onto a new fad or get a new gadget. And he was very competitive.
Shaun and I treated our game like the grudge match of the century. Bowls went everywhere—short, long, wide, wider. I doubt I got any within five feet of the jack. But the weight of that ball made sense in my hand. It felt heavy enough for me to know I could send it down to the other end with force when needed, but light enough that I could deliver it with the finesse it deserved. It felt good, and I won.
“Rematch next week, Hoge,” Shaun said. It was not a question.
“Sure thing,” I said. “I’ll beat you again then too.”
I hardly thought about lawn bowls in the intervening week, but by Tuesday I was set to return to battle. When we arrived, we had a new volunteer trainer. He introduced himself as Frank Plant. Frank was a member of the nearby Wynnum Bowls Club but had come to the neighboring club to help out. We introduced ourselves, ready to get down to business. Shaun and I made sure we were together for the rematch, but it wasn’t quite that easy.
“Okay,” Frank said. “Let’s have a look at how you bowl.”
“It’s okay, Mr. Plant,” I said. “We learned all about it last week. We’re ready to play now.”
He looked at me for a second, then gave a crooked smile.
“Robert, isn’t it?” Frank asked.
“Yes.”
“First thing, Robert,” he said. “Call me Frank, ’cause that’s my name.”
“Okay.”
“Also, we’re not going to play right away,” he said. “You can’t learn to bowl in just one week. There’s a lot of technique to master.”
Inwardly, I groaned. Shaun shrugged. We both figured, though, that if we knuckled down and pretended to focus on mastering new skills, it would be just like last week. We’d be competing in half an hour.
Frank watched a few of the other kids bowl and made some suggestions.
Then it was my turn on the mat. Frank look
ed me over as I took up my unusual stance. I stuck my right leg forward, knee bent, pointing in the direction I wanted the bowl to go. Then I swung my left leg in a big arc and planted it almost perpendicular to my right. That meant I was low to the ground and had to arch my back to have enough room to swing my arm and deliver the bowl. That forced me to put my left hand on the ground for stability. I looked like a human spider.
The bowl I delivered wobbled out of my hand and came to rest about as far from the jack as possible without ending up in the gutter. I looked up as I delivered the bowl and saw Frank watching intently.
“Send another bowl down, Robert,” he said. I did. The result wasn’t much better.
“Is there a reason you look at the ground when you bowl?” Frank asked.
“Not really,” I said.
“Keep your head up,” he said. “Keep your eye on where you want the bowl to end up.”
I craned my head forward, eyes focused intently on my target. But watching my arm swing forward had become habit and my head started to drift down again.
“Eyes up!” Frank shouted, just as I was about to let the bowl go.
It shot off wildly, wobbling to an off-target finish. Behind me someone laughed.
“Try it again,” Frank said. “And keep your eyes forward.”
I forced myself to look straight ahead. The bowl left my hand clean and smooth. It rolled and rolled and I kept watching as it got closer to the jack. It looked as if it was going to land right next to it, but it turned late and overshot the mark by about three feet.
“Bloody brilliant, Robert!” Frank shouted.
Frank carried a few more pounds than he probably should have, but it gave his face a jolly look, especially when he’d shout out, “Good bowl!” or “Nice shot!”