Second Impact

by David Klass

  My hands were full with my reporter’s notebook and my pen and my tape recorder, but I reached out anyway and grabbed her wrist. “Could I interview you about this?” I said. “Could I talk to you about preventing injuries—all the stuff you’ve been pointing out?”

  “I’m not really the person to talk to,” she said. “There are sports medicine specialists who spend their whole lives researching this.”

  “You’re enough of an expert for the Kendall Kourier,” I said. “Plus, you’re local—and there’s a personal angle for me. You’re the one who’s fixing my knee.”

  “Sure,” she said. “But we won’t have much time to talk at the visit—my patients are scheduled pretty tightly.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” said my dad, trying to make a joke, but also trying to let her know that patient productivity matters.

  “Don’t worry about our group,” Dr. Abbot told him. “We could take care of twice as many people if you guys would get that new operating suite built.”

  You could tell my dad was a little taken aback, but he just nodded and pumped his fist, like he was saying, “Go team!”

  Anyway, I’m going to get to interview Dr. Abbot during what she calls her “paperwork time” the day after my pre-op visit, and we’re going to talk about sports injury prevention. So watch this space—I can already see the title: Injury Prevention and the Sports Physiology Geek.

  View 2 reader comments:

  Posted by user Photog_Sophie at 9:23 p.m.

  Thanks for the shout-out! And for the sake of the friendship I’ll even photograph the rest of the season, even though as far as I’m concerned we could just pull pictures of guys and footballs off the Internet and no one would ever know the difference. Just saying. Click here if you’d rather see pictures from Thursday’s performance of Fiddler on the Roof! No naked abs in those, Ms. Edison, don’t worry.

  Posted by user CrustyAlum at 9:23 p.m.

  In my day, men were men, and we didn’t spend so much time whining about our injuries. If you were tackled, you got back up and shrugged it off and kept right on playing. It reflects poorly on the state of today’s high school students that they are unable to shake off some of the tough knocks in the game of life; how will these young men fare should they, heaven forbid, one day be asked to defend our fine country if they cannot even protect a piece of pigskin? It surprises me less to hear that a young woman (I understand we are no longer supposed to call them girls!) is fretting about such minor scrapes and scuffles. I should certainly hope that her male classmates, however, are more able to rise above such incidents.

  BLOGGING THE PARTY

  Posted by user JERRY on November 16 at 8:00 a.m.

  We sliced and diced Mumsford on Friday night, 30–3, and it felt very strange for me to be all suited up but not playing. Of course, Ryan Hurley was more than up to the task. His accuracy and the way he ran the team were impressive—he’s come a long way since last year. I was pulling for him, but I confess I was also a little jealous.

  Carla says that after she got injured she could go to a soccer game and cheer on her replacement at striker and not feel that she should be the one out there. I admire her for that attitude, but I guess I’m hardwired differently. Each time our offense ran onto the field, I was eating my heart out. I wanted Ryan to succeed, but at the same time I also wanted to be the one setting up the play in the huddle, the one taking the snap, the guy cocking his arm and dropping back to pass.

  Instead, I stayed glued to the bench, watching along with five thousand other cheering spectators. All through the game, I was conscious of our fans roaring their approval, and I kept turning around to scan for familiar faces. I picked out dozens of people I knew—students, parents, and townspeople who come to all our games and cheer me on. But they weren’t watching me—they didn’t even know I was there. They were focused on Ryan Hurley. Only one fan seemed aware of me sitting on the bench, and when I looked at him he met my eyes.

  My mom was at her clinic on Friday; she’s a physical therapist and stays late two evenings a week so that patients can come in after work for their rehab. But my dad hasn’t missed a home game in years.

  He always sits on the same high bleacher, wearing the same blue coat, in the same tense pose. Back straight. Arms on knees. Hands clenched nervously. Thinning brown hair blowing in the wind. And then—when we make a good play—he’s on his feet in an instant, clapping and shaking a fist. My father’s a peaceful man, but when he cheers for Kendall it’s as if he’s punching the air, trying to score a knockout. On Friday night he was cheering for our team and Ryan Hurley, but whenever I glanced at him he seemed to sense it and looked back at me.

  I don’t think my dad ever played tackle football in his life, but he hasn’t missed a game of mine since I starred in Pee Wee. When he watches our team play, his black eyes come alive and gleam like tropical fish flashing around a tank. He sometimes stands and cups his hands and calls out surprisingly violent things: “Yeah, way to rip into them! Bust it up the middle! Take no prisoners!”

  My dad is very different from Carla’s dad. He never would have sent me to private school, not that he had the money anyway. He drinks beer rather than wine, and we’ve never sat in box seats in our lives. Dad was a pretty good miler back in the day, and there are three track trophies in our school’s case that have his name on them. He once ran a mile in four minutes and forty-seven seconds, just two seconds off the Kendall record.

  When my father lost his job at the factory, he couldn’t sleep. He’d spend all day looking for work and take any kind of job there was. He washed dishes. He pumped gas. He packed and hauled for a moving company. But sometimes there were simply no jobs out there, and it absolutely killed him. He would knock on doors all day and then pace at night.

  I could hear him downstairs, walking circles around the living room, and then the back door would shut as he slipped outside. He would be back home when I woke up, his eyes red and his face haggard from sleeplessness. I’d sometimes mention that he looked tired and ask where he’d gone. “Just out for a late stroll,” he’d say with a brave grin. “Don’t worry, Jerry, I’m doing fine. Never better.”

  A buddy of mine told me he was up at 3 a.m. one night and spotted my dad all alone, walking the track of our high school in a cold drizzle. The track is a quarter mile around. Dad ran around it four times in four minutes and forty-seven seconds when he was eighteen. I wonder how fast he circled it at forty-two, in the darkness and the rain, worrying about providing for his family. But I never once heard him complain, and he wasn’t trying to walk away from his troubles. He just needed some kind of movement.

  After the Mumsford game, there was a party to celebrate the blowout. I wasn’t planning on going, but my teammates gave me the hard sell. “Come,” Danny urged me. “You don’t have to stay late, but hang with us. I’m heading over with Deb. Show up and have a little fun, Jer. It’ll do you good.” So I went to the party—the first one I’ve gone to all season. Nice house up on a hill. Parents gone.

  Heads turned when I walked in, but five minutes later the music and the dim lighting had swallowed me up. It felt wrong to me that it felt so right, that I could slip so easily back into this scene. I talked to Danny and Deb for a while—they’re a great couple. Teammates walked by and gave me high fives. “Welcome back, bro.” Girls who I used to party with smiled at me. Someone tried to hand me a beer and I poured myself a ginger ale instead.

  I spotted my fellow blogger, Carla, swaying with a tall dude from the lacrosse team. Is he your boyfriend, Carla? Not that it’s any of my business, but bloggers are supposed to paint the full picture, aren’t they? I’ve never heard you mention him, or lacrosse. And if you don’t mind a word of advice, I don’t pretend to know too much about ACL tears, but I’m not sure you should be dancing—even if it’s slow dancing—just before your operation.

  Two bloggers in one corner of the room seemed like too much press, so I started to walk away. And then I froze. Because right th
ere—directly in front of me—was the girl who had been in my car the night of the accident and gotten badly hurt. I hadn’t spoken to her since then, and now we were less than five feet apart.

  She was dancing with some guy I recognized from the JV football team, her eyes half closed. She must have felt my gaze because she opened her eyes and looked at me. I stared awkwardly back at her for a few seconds till she turned away from me and put her head back on her guy’s shoulder. I didn’t have the nerve to say what I should have said, so in case she’s reading this blog, I’ll say it now: it’s not enough, but I’m sorry.

  When the song ended, we left the floor in separate directions, and I decided I had had enough of that party. I said goodbye to Danny and Deb and left on my own.

  I didn’t feel much like going home, so I just walked. I headed down the main street of Kendall, past the bank and the grocery where I work summers as a bagger and the funeral home where I said goodbye to my grandpa two years ago. The shops were all closed, and the lights were off, and not a soul saw me.

  I veered down Christie Lane without even thinking about where I was going, and soon our high school swam into sight. I circled the grounds—the baseball field, the track that I always think of as my father’s track, and the football field that is my own patch of Kendall dirt.

  I’m not sure how long I walked, but at some point it started raining, and by the time I got home, I was wet and shivering. My mom was making herself a cup of tea when I walked through the door. She was still dressed in her clinic uniform—she wears white, like a nurse, with a blue patch near the heart that says, “Amy Downing: Kendall Wellness Physical Therapy, Licensed PT.” She took one look at me and got me a towel, and poured me some hot tea. “Where were you?”

  “Just out for a late stroll,” I told her.

  She studied my face. “Jerry, is everything okay?”

  “Fine,” I told her, with the bravest grin I could muster. “Don’t worry about me, Mom. Never better.”

  View 3 reader comments:

  Posted by user ProudTigerMom at 10:13 a.m.

  Go Ryan Hurley! We in the stands always knew you had it in you! Ryan Ryan Ryan rah rah rah!

  Posted by user DanTheMAN at 11:27 a.m.

  Hey Jer, glad to see your head’s stopped spinning enough to hit up the party, even if only for a second, and post some moderately coherent bloggy thoughts. Too bad you’ll never know what happened after you left that night!

  Posted by user Tigers4EVA at 1:11 p.m.

  Mumsford suxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

  TAKE CARLA’S MIND OFF HER OPERATION!

  Posted by user CARLA on November 16 at 12:00 p.m.

  Slow dancing with a lacrosse player? Is that what you call it? Jerry, I think you may have the makings of a sportswriter, or even a non-sportswriter, or let’s say, a writer about other things even beyond sports. In other words, you’re making up stories. No, he’s not my boyfriend. And you must be kind of out of things over the last six months if you don’t know who his girlfriend is—or was, up to last August—but I’ve taken sort of a pledge not to cover high school dating relationships on this blog. I get into enough trouble as it is. Let’s just say, ask your friend Danny to ask his girlfriend for the story behind “Love and the Lacrosse Team.” And we’ll leave it at that.

  But the guy you’re talking about is a pretty good friend, and he and my best friend, Sophie, had kind of formed themselves into an unofficial Committee for Helping Take Carla’s Mind Off Her Operation. First, Sophie started in on how I can’t sit home all weekend worrying, and there’s going to be this party, and she’ll drive me there, and everyone will be there after the game, and what’s the fun of being a senior if you never go to parties, and who the hell cares if you have something wrong with your knee and you can’t move around too easily. And I was saying no, I really don’t want to go, it’ll just be the same old people and the same old stuff, and Sophie, who knows me better than anyone else in the world, was correctly interpreting this as me being much more scared of the operation than I was willing to admit and planning to spend the weekend at home obsessing. And she wasn’t going to let that happen. (And so, among other things, you have Sophie to thank for the fact that you are not reading several thousand words of angst-filled stream of consciousness that I wrote while spending the weekend alone in my room, Googling the complications of knee surgery and generally driving myself crazy. So next time you see Sophie, you might thank her—I already have, several times.)

  Anyway, while I was putting up my I-don’t-feel-like-a-party defense, I did say, and honestly, that what I like best about parties is dancing, and I really can’t dance. And Sophie, like the true friend she is, recruited a couple of friends—two lacrosse players and a runner, Jerry, if you want their varsity jacket IDs—who promised to take me out on the dance floor and hold me up for a couple of go-rounds, if I so desired. So what you called slow dancing, with its romantic overtones, was actually me draping myself over a tolerant and well-muscled young man in such a way as to put no weight at all on my knee. It didn’t quite feel like dancing. From my side, it felt kind of like learning to walk with crutches all over again, and I would guess that from the guy’s side it felt like some slightly bizarre conditioning exercise in which a weight of more than a hundred pounds (there are limits even to what I am willing to reveal on this blog!) is fastened around your neck and you have to make it through a mixtape.

  Sophie was right, of course. She pretty much always is. She came to pick me up, looking like she always looks, totally great, with the wild curls and the bright red lipstick, and she made me get a little bit dressed up. Nicer, tighter jeans, a silk blouse she made me buy last month on what I suspect was another therapeutic endeavor, a take-poor-Carla-to-the-mall-to-get-her-mind-off-her-knee shopping trip. But Sophie being Sophie, it might also have been designed as a take-poor-Carla-to-the-mall-because-her-clothes-are-boring shopping trip. She got me to buy a turquoise silk spaghetti-strap blouse, even though I said I wasn’t going to wear it. And then she got me to wear it. She, naturally, was wearing something that you can’t buy at the mall, which was either crocheted by tribespeople somewhere who had been dipping into their opium crop or else assembled by Sophie herself from a bunch of doilies that she found in her great-grandmother’s hope chest, the great-grandmother who spent time as a Fauvist painter, I mean. She looked like Sophie. She looked great, and I was glad to be at the party. I did a little “dancing,” but not that much, out of kindness to my partners; if you hadn’t been driven away by whatever odd mix of motives, Jerry, you would have seen me hobble over to the side and sit down very soon.

  Mostly, though, I hung out and looked at who was dancing with whom, with maybe a little more expert decoding than certain quarterbacks are capable of, and I talked to friends, and I felt good, I felt like a high school kid doing what high school kids do on a weekend and not someone about to have doctors cut holes in her leg and insert high-tech instruments—although, of course, I was both. A high school kid and a person about to have the holes cut in her leg, I mean.

  I even ended up, later that night, talking about Jerry Downing. I was watching some videos with a gang of kids, mostly footage of the Kendall football team over the past couple of years that the kid whose house it was had collected. We were being kind of silly, screaming and cheering over plays that happened a year ago, two years ago, and talking about the ways that the players have grown and changed, and a play came on from last year, from before Jerry had to quit the team. It was a game against Forest Park, the one where the whole thing turned on Granger catching an interception and then Jerry Downing driving the ball down the field in something like seven completions, one after another. And we were all just howling, like it was a game going on right in front of us on live TV and we didn’t know how it was going to end. By the last play, first and goal, everyone was standing up—well, not me, but everyone else—and cheering for that long-ago touchdown and a quarterback showing his stuff in a season that was about to go sour. Kind of
impressive, I have to say.

  So yes, it was a party. Jerry should have stuck around; sounds like he let himself get driven away more by his own demons than by anything anyone else was actually feeling. The usual people did the usual things, most of which cannot be mentioned on this blog, and I hung out with the people who don’t do so much of those usual things, but it felt noisy and friendly and like the place to be, and I was glad to be there, even though on some level I knew I was also the person about to have holes cut in her leg.

  And even though I was saying up above that thanks to Sophie, you are all being spared the gory details about surgical complications, I need to warn you that you are about to get the other gory details.

  View 3 reader comments:

  Posted by user Photog_Sophie at 6:13 p.m.

  Here’s a link to a photo Carla doesn’t know I took of an outfit she refused to buy … comment if you think she should have worn that!

  Posted by user @Photog_Sophie at 6:17 p.m.

  HAWT! Who says New Jersey girls don’t know how to shop?

  Posted by user CrustyAlum at 8:22 p.m.

  In my day, girls wore appropriate clothing to school and social activities. We weren’t Puritans, of course, but it was expected that young women would cover their shoulders and not flaunt their various body parts all over as if they were working in clubs of dubious intent. It is always upsetting to see today’s youth attempting to imitate the seedier versions of nightlife that have come to encroach upon our otherwise wholesome town. What such young ladies see in these characters as role models is frankly beyond me, but it suggests a severe lack of parenting!

  UNDER THE KNIFE

  Posted by user CARLA on November 18 at 4:00 p.m.

  Well, the painkillers are making me a little groggy, but I’m going out of my mind with boredom, so let me tell you about my special day. So first of all, you have to stop eating and drinking at midnight the night before. My mom had taken the day off from work, and she was kind of fixated on that rule, like she thought I was going to forget and next thing she knew, she would look around and I would be drinking my glass of orange juice or spooning up my morning yogurt and granola. I guess she was just anxious about the whole thing; it made her hover kind of close—we aren’t usually a particularly clingy mother-daughter pair—and it made me act all let-me-alone and hey-I-get-it.