The Beauty of Men Never Dies: An Autobiographical Novel

My Injured Foot

29 My Injured Foot The summer when I was twelve I cut my ankle very badly. Only this morning as I was awakening did I realize that it was the same year that my father died. He died the previous winter, just two days before my twelfth birthday. I don’t need to go into how. We never got along. It must have been early summer when I cut my foot. My mother was home. She had started teaching school once my father died and normally left the house before my sister and I did on school days. But this was Saturday. I was lying on my bed reading, and my mother called me, for breakfast perhaps. I was lying sideways on the bed and decided for some smart-alecky reason to push myself off the bed using my feet against the wall. One foot went through a window. My badly gashed ankle gushed with blood as I called out for my mother. She bound it up with a towel, called the doctor, and helped me hobble out to the car. Dr. Martha Goltz sewed the wound up, and I spent the rest of the summer on crutches, reading most days with my foot propped on a chair with a cushion under it. What was called “proud flesh” grew in the wound, and it has always been a sizeable scar, prompting questions from doctors whenever I’ve had a physical examination, of which there have been many through my years of school and the U.S. Navy and insurance applications. I studied ballet and danced professionally on that damaged ankle and have always exercised almost daily without problems. But very recently extending my exercises into yoga and body stretching, my placement on my feet is changing, for the better, and I am aware of not 30 My Injured Foot standing squarely on my feet. And as I do, the injured ankle and its foot have become sore. And I am prompted to think of the original injury. Did I at twelve, with my father recently dead and the prospect of beginning summer and part-time jobs and entering high school soon after and playing all the high school sports (which I subsequently did and hated), injure myself unconsciously but deliberately? The discipline I learned from my mother kept it from ever interfering with my progress through my teens. It never bothered me any more than did my homosexuality . My mother’s and my grandparents’ instillation of a sense of self-worth made it seem quite acceptable: “If it’s me, it must be all right.” And now, in my seventies, the circle comes round. I am correcting the position of my body on the foot that was altered by that early injury. I injured myself perhaps to avoid the responsibilities I saw looming. But I accepted them anyway. And now I am returning to my pre-injury self. My great friend Jean Ann said to me years ago, “Some people look upon homosexuality as a sin. Some people look upon it as a crime. You seem to look upon it as a luxury.” As I was brought up to think of myself as special, perhaps I have seen homosexuality as something special. Not exactly a luxury, but not for everyone. I have been lucky. ...