Flip-flop horror: A cautionary tale

As a sort of olive branch to Dana Stevens, and an amp­li­fic­a­tion of her thoughts on the top­ic, I offer this pos­sibly hor­rif­ic long anecdote. 

Why did I even start wear­ing flip-flops in the first place?

It’s an inter­est­ing ques­tion. In the­ory I, like so many
oth­er self-proclaimed per­sons of taste and refine­ment, find them objectionable.
By the same token, I rarely if ever have found my eye wan­der­ing to the exposed
toes of my fel­low humans. Strangely, the habit began with a pre­text that
related dir­ectly to pur­suit of enhanced phys­ic­al fitness. 

In addi­tion to my gym regi­men, which around this time last
year had been enhanced and chal­lenged with the imple­ment­a­tion of box­ing and
strength train­ing ses­sions, swim­ming became a big thing for me. The Red Hook
recre­ation cen­ter has a won­der­ful pool, and it’s only about a ten minute walk
from my own res­id­ence to said rec cen­ter. As I got slim­mer and fit­ter over the
years between 2010 and 2012, my trips to the pool were made in more and more
min­im­al out­er­wear. Few things pleased me more than a walk to Red Hook in a
t‑shirt and swim trunks, tow­el tucked into an old Cannes Film Festival
com­mem­or­ative bag—hideous in design but a per­fect size for stuff­ing into the
not-terribly-capacious lock­ers at the facility—iPod pour­ing Phil Manzanera’s
“Frontera” into my ears. At some point, per­haps dur­ing a trip to Target, a
little voice told me I could dis­pense with socks on these trips, if I got a
sturdy enough pair of flip-flops. And so I did.

The switch cer­tainly did enhance the whole “Nature Boy” feel
of my excur­sions. And I could keep the flip-flops on when I went from the
lock­er room to the deck, and so on. I also did, I admit, find it amus­ing to
sport foot­wear that had been sub­jec­ted to a great deal of dys­peptic dis­dain by
an ostens­ible movie blog­ger whom I will not give the sat­is­fac­tion of naming
here. This was all well and good as far as it went. But it wasn’t long before I
star­ted to behave, I guess, like a hip­pie with no god­damn hair. I wore the
flip-flops on brief errands. During entire day trips to Fire Island. My Lovely
Wife declined to encour­age me in my folly, and so I did not wear them on more
form­al social occa­sions. But dur­ing the day, when she wasn’t around? Yup.

Then one day last July, dur­ing an indol­ent late after­noon, I
went to my gym wear­ing the flip-flops. The gym, a pretty deluxe one, has
sev­er­al floors, and recep­tion is on the second. Now when I say “deluxe” one of
the things I mean is that its over­all design is pretty soph­isto, so, for
instance, the stairs lead­ing up to the recep­tion area on the second floor are
rimmed with a tex­tured steel. So if you are bound­ing up the stairs like an
idi­ot, and you do that thing where you fall for­ward, and you put your right
foot out to brace the poten­tial fall, and your foot slips out­side of the
flip-flop as you are uncon­sciously execut­ing these actions, and your bare foot
slams hard upon the met­al edge of the indi­vidu­al step your foot is seek­ing to
brace against the fall…

Oh yes. Ouch. The impact stung, and stung hard, and I
yelled; some­thing like “Oh shit!” and then I star­ted hob­bling up the remainder
of the steps. I was not pre­pared to see the huge V‑shaped gash that now
dec­or­ated the under­side of my right big toe. Nor the enorm­ous amount of blood
that pumped forth from it. Remember the first murder scene in Dario Argento’s Suspiria? Those couple of shots that actu­ally look like a
knife going into a mam­mali­an organ of some sort? Yeah, that’s the kind of thing
I’m talk­ing about. 

Needless to say, the gym staffers at the front desk were a
little non­plussed to see me bleed­ing all over their nice (pos­sibly simulated)
slate floor. Someone brought me a chair and anoth­er employ­ee went scur­ry­ing for
a first aid kit, and when that was pro­cured, I basic­ally poured an entire
bottle of per­ox­ide over my foot. A woman com­ing up the stage saw the
undoubtedly bizarre tableau and said, “I’m a sur­geon, can I help?” Myself and the
oth­er gym people attend­ing me all gasped “Yes!” sim­ul­tan­eously and the woman
then laughed and said “I’m jok­ing.” No, I’m not mak­ing that up, in case you’re
won­der­ing what makes me so bitter.

The very accom­mod­at­ing gym people, after help­ing me put a
fuck­wad of gauze and adhes­ive tape around my injured digit, asked if I wanted
to call an ambu­lance, but no, big brave me said he was okay to walk the six
blocks over to Long Island College Hospital’s emer­gency room. And so I did. I
need not detail the emer­gency room wait. You’ve all been there. But once out of
the wait­ing room, my wound was treated under mildly unusu­al (I hope)
con­di­tions. For one thing, the per­son doing the stitch­ing was also the
admit­ting nurse for the room. Which meant that the stitch­ing went like this:
she would inject my toe with a loc­al anes­thet­ic, accom­plish maybe two, three
joins, so to speak…and then go back out and admit a few more patients and all
sorts of oth­er stuff, and then she’d get back and the loc­al anes­thet­ic had worn
off, and she’d start stitch­ing again, and I’d squirm, because it hurt, and
she’d shoot more loc­al anes­thet­ic into my toe, and step out to admit more
patients…anyway you get the idea. By this time My Lovely Wife had joined me,
and she was enlis­ted to assist in my treat­ment. I had been moved into a supply
room of the facil­ity, and the over­head light therein was wonky, but there was a
little goose­neck lamp that my attend­ing per­son was using for the close-up work.
Only its neck was broken, so the light wouldn’t stay put. So My Lovely Wife
stood next to the nurse and held the lamp steady dur­ing the pro­cess of putting
in twenty stitches, which took until about one in the morn­ing. (I had been
admit­ted at 7:30 the pre­vi­ous even­ing.) “How long have you two been mar­ried?” asked
my heal­er, who was a very petite, extremely brusque woman maybe ten or twelve
years my seni­or. “Six years,” one of us replied through grit­ted teeth. “That
long?” she marveled, sound­ing slightly dis­gus­ted. “You’re so POLITE to each
oth­er.” (“You were not polite to me at all,” My Lovely Wife will sometimes
remind me. “I was in excru­ci­at­ing pain,”
I will counter. And really. You should have seen me. I didn’t yell, or cry. I
spoke tersely, I admit, and in a less than ingra­ti­at­ing tone at times. But I
was in excru­ci­at­ing pain.) At one
point she chose to inform me that my wound was suf­fi­ciently deep that I might
well have severed the toe com­pletely, con­tem­pla­tion of which fact might have
made me puke had I not been suf­fi­ciently dis­trac­ted by my, you know,
excru­ci­at­ing pain.

I had to go to an ortho­ped­ist every week for a while to get
the wound checked, and I was told that the attend­ing nurse had in fact done a
great job with my stitches, and were you to look at the under­side of my right
big toe now, you’d nev­er know any­thing had happened to it. As a mat­ter of fact,
look­ing at my feet right now, I’m not sure wheth­er it was the right big toe or
the left. What is it they say about the mind not let­ting you remem­ber pain in a
cer­tain way?

The wound wasn’t the only bad thing. While hop­ping around
try­ing to find a place where I could buy a prop­er ortho­ped­ic shoe (the hospital
only had a direly under­sized one to issue me; I’ve got
Frankenstein-monster-size feet), I lost my cell phone (didn’t fuck­ing cry about
it like a fuck­ing baby, though). (Incidentally, if you’re in NYC and find
your­self need­ing that kind of thing, appar­ently C. Bigelow on Sixth Avenue has
the hook­up and then some, a dis­cov­ery for which I once again owe My Lovely Wife
big time.) Also, while being laid up in a sense for six weeks was a substantial
aid inso­far as writ­ing a book was con­cerned, it threw a huge mon­key wrench into
my fit­ness routine. Now, as the pub­lic pool open­ing approaches and I have
per­man­ently fores­worn flip-flops, I feel too fat to go. This too will pass, I
sup­pose, but ser­i­ously, kids: do what Dana Stevens and that crybaby-who-will-not-be-named tell you:
don’t rock the flip-flops.