Yours truly bringing hacky sack to Twyford.
TOE MONEY
It was the summer of 1987. Life was good, but everything is relative. Life was a hell of a lot better than it was during the summer of 1986 when I graduated high school, and with no real plans for my future, got a job working in the shipping department of a manufacturing plant. Those were good days, don’t get me wrong… actually, some of the best. No more high school, heck, no more school what-so-ever since I didn’t have any plans for college. I drove around in either my Karmann Ghia or on my Yamaha RD200, yucked it up with the guys I worked with all week, then on the weekends my good friend Jimmy and I would spend all our free time playing hacky sack on the beach at Stone Mountain Park during the day, then hanging out on the lawn watching the laser show at night. I can still feel that cool grass under me as I lay there looking up at the stars… I mean, I had seen that laser show a thousand times, so I wasn’t missing anything new… so I laid there, my back on that thick summer grass with a belly full of Lemon Quench frozen drinks that we bought from the cart and spiked with rum that we smuggled in disguised with Mountain Dew bottles. My mind a little numb from those quenches, taking in those stars so far away and realizing that I had my whole life ahead of me, just not quite knowing what to do with it.
So how could 1987 be any better than that awesome summer of 1986? Well, the fact of the matter is that 1986 turned into a real shit-show of epic proportions. In typical fashion, life can’t stay too good for too long before the gods of “I’m gonna jerk your ass back into reality” come reigning holy hell down on me. At this particular time in my life… oh yeah, there would be others… the gods picked July 31st of 1986. On that day I was told to crate up a concrete compression tester so that it could get shipped out. I had seen these things around the warehouse, they looked like little green robots. They were about four feet high with a small motor on one side and some hydraulic hoses coming out of them. I always thought they looked kind of friendly, but that was before I found out that they were the true spawn of Satan. Little did I know those bastards weighed about 2,000 pounds. To me, it looked like 50 pounds as it fell off the forklift towards me and I tried to catch it. It quickly felt like 2,000 pounds as it nearly ripped my arms off and then landed on my left foot.
I screamed. I screamed like I had NEVER screamed before and then I was like a really pissed off David Banner, pushing that machine off my foot and falling to the ground. Things start getting foggy around this point in the story. I remember Bill Keegan, Viet Nam vet, hurdling over stacks of PVC pipe with a big knife drawn. Swooping down on me like a commando, cutting off my Nike. I remember passing out at the sight of what was left of my foot, bones jutting out of my bloody sock. In the ambulance, the paramedic kept asking me who the president was, and I couldn’t comprehend what that had to do with diddly squat. At the hospital, the nurses were screaming at me to “shut up” because I came-to and was hollering out of my mind. Bedside manner, not a “thing” in the 80’s. They had obviously never experienced having their foot chewed off by a little green robot. When the morphine kicked in, my dad showed up and I could hear him and Mr. Johnson, the warehouse manager who rode in the ambulance with me, talking about the doctors wanting to amputate my foot. Mr. Johnson told my dad about a doctor who worked on his son after a bad baseball injury. Dr. St. Pierre worked out of the same hospital that I was in, but unfortunately, he was in his other office across town that day. The next thing I know, dad is rolling me down the hall in a wheelchair, possibly not with the hospital’s permission, putting me in the Pinto, and burning rubber, as much as a Pinto can, away from those butchers that were going to hack me up.
At Dr. St. Pierre’s office, dad left me in the car with the window down while he ran inside. Some kids walking by said, “damn, what happened to THAT guy?” I may or may not have been drooling all down the side of the Pinto, because… morphine. Sometime later, someone got me out of the car, on a table, and I got more x-rays taken. Good news, this mysterious Saint (Pierre) thinks he can save the foot, so he books me an extended stay at Shallowford Hospital and schedules the first of many surgeries.
A few days later, my foot was filled with pins and stapled back together. This was the same foot that I burned real bad when I was a toddler, so now it looked more freak-show than normal. Back then, private hospital rooms were only for the rich and famous, so I had to share a room. I went through numerous roommates, including the guy who would turn off the t.v. at night even though I was watching it, and the guy who would save all his pain pills throughout the day to take a big dose all at once. I couldn’t sleep worrying that dude was going to stop breathing. This went on for months. That’s right, months. I was in the hospital so long that my sister got her hairstylist friend to sneak her scissors into the hospital and give me a haircut in the bathroom.
I had a lot of visitors. I knew that I must have been in bad shape when my brother Charlie drove down from South Carolina just to visit with me for a few hours. My other siblings visited, friends from high school dropped by or called, candy stripers kept me company, my mom who would NOT drive on the freeway took backroads to come and visit me EVERY SINGLE DAY (she was the real saint… truly), and dad gave me a boombox so that I could listen to my cassettes. He also told me that he found a bottle of rum in the back of my car, but I got a pass on getting in trouble because of the whole “serious injury” thing.
There were other surgeries to move things around and replace pins. The insides were healing great; the outsides, not so much. Apparently, the tissue was crushed pretty bad and was not coming back to life as expected. I was finally sent home sometime in October with appointments to see a plastic surgeon. I remember hobbling into my first appointment with Dr. Tom Lois. I took a seat in the waiting room and then started looking around. There I was, 18 years old with a bandaged foot, sitting there with about six extremely attractive women. Then here comes Dr. Lois, walking through the room… the dude was tall, dark, and handsome… and these ladies were all swooning. I was a little slow on the uptake, but after more careful observation, I put two and two together… boob jobs. When he took me back, we discussed a couple of options; one, taking skin from my butt and grafting it to my foot, and two, sewing my left foot to the inside of my right leg to graft the skin. Number 2 sounded better than the whole butt thing; I mean, can you imagine if word ever hit the street that I had literal “ass” on my foot? Dr. Lois was leaving for a Mexican vacation in the morning, so he asked to see me in a couple of weeks to discuss further. This guy had it going on. Man, I can still remember how bad I wanted to BE Dr. Lois.
I counted down the days to my next appointment and a chance to hang out in the waiting room again. This time, it was more of the same, but Dr. Lois was running behind. While I sat in the small room with all those beauty queens, one of them, noticed me as the oddball in the room and asked why I was seeing Dr. Lois. There I was, with a captive audience, so I told the story of how I barely escaped death in all its glory, loud enough for everyone to hear, and I couldn’t get enough of the “oh, honey”s and the “oh, you poor baby”s. I was in heaven.
But every party has a pooper, and that was Dr. Lois when he called me back into one of the examination rooms. Things were not looking good with the foot; specifically, my big toe, or “great” toe as it is known in medical terms. Mine wasn’t so great; I had gangrene which meant there was not going to be any skin grafts, there was going to be an amputation. Dr. Lois assured me that the only thing I wouldn’t be able to do in life was run track because I wouldn’t be able to push off the starting block with my toe. He was actually wrong about that, there was plenty that I couldn’t do… shift a motorcycle, join the Marines, or have balance in the dark, among other things. He mentioned that people who get their thumbs cut off end up using their big toes for a thumb… damn, and I thought I had it bad.
The amputation was done a few days before Halloween, and I really don’t remember much about that time. I do remember being in a pain killing fog when a dapper gentleman walked into my hospital room and introduced himself as Montague Shannon… Monte would eventually become my stepfather, and he was a very good man. So, I lost a toe, but gained a stepfather. After the amputation, I had to go to endless rounds of physical therapy to get back on my feet again. I absolutely despised physical therapy, but I also had a few more follow-up appointments with Dr. Lois (and the waiting room ladies), so I tried to schedule them on the same day to balance out the good and the bad.
I went back to work at some point that year and they moved me up into the office. I guess I was too much of a liability out in the warehouse, so they created a position for me in collections. I was the guy who had to call our customers when their bills were past due. This role is typically reserved for tough guys who would go out and break kneecaps if the money wasn’t paid. This meant that I wasn’t the greatest fit, but I got to sit in my own cubicle in the air-conditioned office and wear a tie to work every day. It was the 80s so my friend Bender started referring to me as “Mr. Skinny Tie.” After going back to work, a couple of good things started finally happening. First, I was told that there was a price for every body part, and I was going to be paid $3,600 for the loss of a great toe… and it was a great toe… gone too soon. Second, the company hired this scientist fella from England named Geoffrey Dunsterville. Who the heck spells Jeff with a “G”? Anyways, in addition to all of my responsibilities collecting money for the company, I was also in charge of ordering the office supplies, so I was one of the first to meet Geoff because he needed a particular kind of mechanical pencil. When I delivered Geoff his fancy pencils, he told me that they were “lovely”. I had never heard a dude say “lovely” before, so I knew this guy was going to be interesting. Now, how does this fancy foreign scientist rank up there on a list of “things that made the summer of 1987 one of the best ever” which included getting $3,600 for my toe (R.I.P.)? Well, Geoff had a couple of teenage daughters, and they were coming to visit for the summer. I was such a good pencil deliverer (as well as the office gopher), that Geoff asked if I could help entertain them while they were here. Sign me up!
So, 1987 was starting to shape up better than 1986 ended. I got my giant check and used half of my Toe Money to put a down payment on a brand spanking new Suzuki Samurai. They were marketed as “The Fun Machine”, and boy howdy was I in need of just that. For a little over $7,000, it was literally one of the best investments of my life. At least the first half of the Toe Money paid off. I completely loved that car, and I broke down and cried in the Honda parking lot 10 years later when I traded it in for a four-door Civic; but that is a different story for a different day. The Samurai allowed me to have something else to drive while I swapped the beat up 1972 body of the Ghia with a cooler 1962 version (one of many projects sadly never completed), and it also provided something fun to chauffeur the Dunsterville girls around in all summer.
Claire and Lucy arrived, and man, I was smitten. Claire looked like the girl in the “Take on Me” video, and Lucy was the very cool, dark, artsy type. They said words like “Zedbra”, listened to funky music, and thought things were “brilliant” instead of “bitchin’”. We went to softball games, Stone Mountain Park, hung out at my apartment in the slums, and went to quite a few movies. I remember them picking “The Living Daylights” for the first film, naturally. We drove the Fun Machine all over Georgia that summer with the top off and had a blast. By the time they had to head back home, Claire and I were moon-eyed for each other. So much so, that I wore out the Royal Mail writing letters to her back home in merry old England. Before they left, their mom (who was also visiting) told me that, if I ever had an opportunity to go to England, I could stay with them. As an adult looking back on it, I now understand that she was just being polite. What she didn’t count on was that I had Toe Money.
So, in 1987 you could get a gallon of gas for $0.89, a new house for $92k, a Ford Escort (top selling car in 1987) for $6,895, and a plane ticket to England for ½ of a big toe. What I didn’t count on was that the USD took a crap against the GBP, and the exchange rate was 1.887; in other words, stuff over in England cost nearly twice as much as in the U.S. when you were buying it with U.S. Dollars. I hadn’t gone to college (yet… that would eventually happen), so that meant nothing to me at the time; plus, you can’t put a price on love can you? I saved up all my vacation days and booked a flight for mid-December, coming home after New Years. Claire and I were going to be spending the holidays together!
Right before I left for the airport, I was going over the details with Geoff, and he gave me the phone number of some relative of his, “in case no one is there to pick you up”. Wait, what? Why would that even be a thing? I shoved it in my pocket and went to the airport. After I checked my bag, I got on the plane and put on the earphones of my imitation Walkman and cranked up my Cinderella cassette while the plane took off. I stayed glued to the window while we flew over New York, and then the Atlantic Ocean. We were over Ireland as the sun was rising, and I could not believe how GREEN it was. Finally, we landed at Gatwick.
I got off the plane, exhausted from staying up all night, and followed the herd through baggage claim and customs. In customs, I was pulled aside and asked to empty my bags. I had purchased Christmas presents for all of the Dunstervilles and had them wrapped and packed in my suitcase. The customs guy pulled out all of my clothes, ripped open the wrapped presents, then said I was good to go as he walked away, leaving me standing there in a pile of my underwear, perfume, girl’s sweaters, and a hacky sack. I shoved it all back in my suitcase and hurried through the line, worried that Claire was wondering what was taking me so long. I came out of the customs area and was about to burst with excitement at the first sight of Claire. I looked around and didn’t see her. I walked to the other side of the airport and didn’t see her. I sat on my suitcase and waited… and waited and waited and waited, and still didn’t see her. Then I remembered the phone number that Geoff had given me. I went to a payphone, but quickly realized it wasn’t going to take my lousy American quarters. I had to go to the foreign exchange and convert some of my dollars so that I could make a phone call. I dialed the number and got a woman who had no idea who I was, but when I explained my situation, she said she would get in touch with Mrs. Dunsterville and let her know that I needed to be picked up. So, I went back to waiting.
Hours later, right when I was about to try and call that number again, I see Mrs. Dunsterville and Claire’s little brother Edward walking through the airport. My heart was in my throat waiting for the first sight of Claire, but she wasn’t there. They apologized saying that they thought the flight was delayed. I quickly asked about Claire, and Edward rolled his eyes and swished his hips saying, “she’s at her boyfriend’s house.” My heart dropped from my throat to the pit of my stomach like a heavy, jagged stone.
The Dunsterville’s lived in Twyford which was about an hour and a half from Gatwick. It was a long and awkward drive where I realized that England was much bigger than London, and that Twyford was not London. When we arrived at their house, I made myself at home on the bottom bunk of Edward’s bunk bed. I honestly can’t remember the moment I met Claire again. Things were a bit uncomfortable for me to come and plant myself at these people’s home during Christmas. Everyone was a bit busy, running around before the holidays, so I spent a lot of time with Edward who was probably 13 at the time. Edward showed me how to walk to downtown Twyford where there were shops, restaurants, the train station, and a place to buy film. This was a long walk through different neighborhoods, fields, churches, and past the neighborhood pub called The King’s Arms, which Edward affectionately called The King’s Arse. I got to know this path well, and walked daily in to town to give me something to do.
When it was closer to Christmas, Geoff flew in to be with his family, and thank the lord for that! When Geoff got there, we drove into London one night and saw the sights. I remember on the way home we stopped off and bought beer in a 2-litre plastic bottle and went to a party at someone’s house where folks kept filling my glass with beer. I looked at Geoff and he told me that you only had to be 18 to drink in England… hot damn. Eventually, I saw more of Lucy and Claire, and met most of Claire’s friends. All of us kids took a train into Reading and saw a play one night which made me realize how easy it was to get around. One day I hopped on a train by myself and went to Henley-on-Thames because it was the 80s and the “Henley” shirt was all the rage; I just had to see where it originated. That was a very cool town, or “village” would be a more appropriate description. These places like Twyford, Reading, and Henley were so nice; historic and modern at the same time. On the way home, I swung by The King’s Arse because I could. I sat at the bar and ordered “a beer.” Man, did I get put in my place as an American ordering “a beer.” The barman looked at me like I was an idiot, looked at all the taps in front of him and said, “which one?” I don’t really remember what I got, I just remember that it was dark and warm. I sat at a table and soon some other people sat with me. We hit it off, and I realized that The King’s Arse was a fun place to be; I spent many an afternoon there during the rest of my trip.
I remember digging up the Christmas tree from the backyard and bringing it inside (then replanting it after Christmas). We spent Christmas Eve in a church that was older than my mind could comprehend. We drove out to the country on very narrow roads where you had to wait for sheep to get out of your way. The Dunstervilles had their milk delivered right to their doorstep and it had cream floating on top. Their light switches were buttons, and they had heated towel holders in the bathroom. You could jump on a super modern train in Twyford and go anywhere in England while traveling through villages with buildings that were thousands of years old (unlike everything that I was used to in the U.S. which was closer to 200 years old). We went to Windsor Castle, Piccadilly Circus, and Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. I bought cool shoes, some new clothes, and a LOT of albums from artists that Lucy and Claire recommended. I quickly ran out of cash (thanks exchange rate) and had to use my emergency credit card, but I didn’t care. We celebrated Boxing Day, and rang in the New Year, and soon it was time for me to head home.
It’s funny, I have always told the short version of this story as “I lost half my Toe Money going to England to see a girl who had a boyfriend”. But now that I reminisce on that whole experience, it was so much more than that. Sure, I spent a lot of time drowning my sorrows in The King’s Arse (boy, that sounds odd), but I had a tremendous amount of experiences that I wouldn’t have had otherwise. Reflecting on this, nearly 36 years later, I think I actually got a good return on my Toe Money.
Postscript:
Those concrete compression machines were few and far between, so we knew the serial numbers and where they were located. The one that crushed my foot came back in for repairs once, and I had a chance to go and give it a piece of my mind. I don’t know who crated it up that day, but we later found out that it fell off the ship it was on and is now at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean… karma.
Typewritten tales of life 
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