Sometimes, it’s funny how far the universe
will go, just to make me laugh. The other day I was answering what was probably
my 400th email when I opened one from my friend Nancy. She
works at this company owned by Johnson & Johnson, and somehow she ended up
on the mailing list for a company that makes prosthetic limbs. So, I open
up the “prosthetic limbs” catalog, and there’s a page dedicated entirely to…
Peglegs.
There they were. A sea of peglegs, wedged in between those cool
titanium arcs that amputee runners are using these days, and normal looking
limbs like the one Paul McCartney’s new wife has that she took off on Larry
King Live. Peglegs—just sitting there, like tiny throwbacks to some
Revolutionary War era before prostheses existed. “Yes, we serve our
purpose,” they seemed to say. “Function over form.” The pegleg is
about as no-nonsense as you can get, practically turning the human amputee into
a piece of broken furniture. You need something to prop you up? Here’s
a peg. Stick it on your stump.
At any rate, I didn’t know they were still making them. And they
are. And they come in blue.
Even the word is funny, and, I thought, had been relegated to silly
pirate cartoons and old war reenactments, like the guy with the pegleg and the
American Flag, and his friend is playing some flute, and they just won the war. The
pegleg is fine for him. In fact, I would EXPECT a pegleg in a movie
concerned with accuracy, or maybe a Civil War reenactment.
When you become an amputee, do they give you this catalog? How
shocking must it be to realize that not only do you have no leg, but that
pegleg is still one of your options.
But maybe I’m making too much of this. On to the second part of
circumstance conspiring to entertain me.
While I’m looking, perhaps obsessively, at the pegleg selection, my
phone rings. It’s my actress friend who also works as a yoga instructor at
our gym. She’s breathless, hysterical. She’s screaming, crying,
screaming. Between sobs and shrieks, I ascertain that there’s been some
kind of car accident, and that I should come right away. Somehow I feel guilty
for being so consumed with the pegleg catalog.
I get in my car, and make it from
Santa Monica
to
West Hollywood
about as
quickly as anyone has ever made it there. In the front of the gym, there
is a large hole where someone has driven their car. Into the glass. Into
the wall. Over my friend’s desk. It’s all completely destroyed, like
it was all made of paper mache. Through a series of questions directed at
everyone who’s there and anyone who will listen, I manage to piece together the
facts: an hour before, an elderly woman had driven her car through the
front of the gym. She was trying to park, ran over the curb, and drove
directly
Later, I will learn that it was only a strange, preternatural experience
that saved my friend. She’d been sitting at her desk—the desk now smashed
into a thousand pieces and marred by black tire treads—when she heard a voice
in her head say “Get up and run.” She did, and not five seconds later, the
car came crashing through the window, through the gym, and over the place where
she’d been sitting. Had she not heard that voice, she would certainly have
been killed.
Even later, I will discover the cause of the accident—a strange, raw
fact that brings it all around for me, and enables me to make my friend laugh
through what is certain to develop into a whopping case of PTSD. Names
have been omitted, of course.
From the accident report: Accident was caused when Mrs. P’s pegleg
got caught in the accelerator. Mrs. P reports that she’s been looking for
a pegleg with a wider base, so it will stop getting stuck in the gas pedal.
I only wish I’d known. I’ve got a great catalog for her.