I’ve just run several hundred yards up to a group of men on a putting green, who are about to have their day take a very strange turn. I take my hands away from my face and blood comes shooting out of my mouth as I ask for help. It’s safe to say this is not how they expected their golf-day to start.

It’s either Friday or Monday of Memorial Day 1986, and I, along with Jim Papa, Dan Montouri, and I think it was Ralph Coon, but it might have been Rick Miller, have spent the beautiful school-vacation morning playing  golf. One of us had the brilliant idea that if we play real fast, we can get in the second nine, so we’re basically golf-jogging. I’ve hit my ball, and am running further up the hole when Jim’s ball comes into view from my left side. The ball is head high. Specifically, my head. With the reflexes I have displayed my entire life, I slowly gawk and turn directly towards it, as it hits me between my nose and lip, bursts a whole in my upper lip, and shoots my left incisor tooth out of my mouth and into the grass. 

I’m sure I made a sound that is both sad and hilarious, but I have no idea. The boys come up rapidly, and I have no recollection of how they reacted, other than they found my tooth as I ran back towards the club-house.  One yelled to me to drop my golf-bag, which I’m still mindlessly lugging over my shoulder. 

Now, back to the poor guys who’ve just been Gene Simmons upon. The closest one, who’s been watching me shamble up like something from a zombie movie turned so pale, it’s like he’d just completed in the hundred yard bleed-a-thon, and not me. Actually those guys were great, and in rapid succession I have a towel, ice and a phone. My poor dad will, once again, get a phone call telling him that his youngest son should be taken to the emergency room for a ridiculous accident, but there’s a tale for another day. 

We went to the dentist first, actually. My boyhood dentist, with his naugahyde sofas and the world’s cheesiest waiting room music, is open, and willing to see me NOW. Dad, me, and the tooth (in a cup of ice) all go see Dr. McMahon, and he sticks the tooth back in my gum-hole, glues or screws some metal into my front teeth, and basically says “let’s see what happens.” 

Now, finally, we can go to the ER to sew up my face. I have a star-shaped scar in the philtrum-groove beneath my nose, and the numbing shots the doc put in are still the most painful thing I’ve ever experienced. While he’s sewing me face up, the doc accuses me of ditching school, which is infuriating because 1) I couldn’t move to object  2) I was the world’s biggest goody-two-shoes nerd in the world in high-school, and funny in retrospect because 3) in PA school three of us DID ditch a class for most of a semester for our weekly afternoon golf-game.  

Eventually my lip will swell up to probably an inch thick, and when I get back to school, one of my best friends will tell people behind my back “I didn’t think he could get funnier looking, but I was wrong.”