September 20, 2018:
Between frames on that roll of Instamatic film I broke my left arm.
Well — the expression is imprecise. I didn't take a hammer to it or anything. It's actually gravity and the density of matter which broke it.
I slipped from the monkey bars in a public park, probably either Sunshine Park or Rolando Park in La Mesa. Broke it landing awkwardly on the cold hard ground.
Something was cleeeaaaaarrrrlllly wrong: big red welt where the bone was fucking sticking up.
The elderly couple who were my sitters at that age were habitually convinced that children complained over non-things, so that, this time among others when I was in fact actually injured or being injured, they more or less told me to suck it up. Fortunately my guardian angel was present in the form of an off-duty nurse, who knew from looking at it that it was obviously broke. I do not remember it being reset, although it must have been. I do remember vividly the wet plaster going on, wrapped up in layer after layer of webbed fabric in rolls that went on in circles around my thin little arm. That was fascinating, as was the strangely harmless electric saw later used to remove the thing.
So that in one frame I'm opening xmas presents on the floor of our apartment, with no cast; while in the next frame I'm on the floor of my mom's bestie's house, still xmas, with the tree behind me, my left arm all casted up. Both images are margin-stamped "Feb 64" by the processing lab. Bless their hearts for that.
I enjoyed the cast. About a million kids signed it for me at school. Badge of popularity.
First of several broken limbs. Next it was the right arm, in Clairemont, and again the adults in my world chose to not believe it. That time I got aspirins for an entire weekend before finally seeing the doctor on Monday. Fuck you mom. Broken. The left one again in sixth grade: it's casted-up in the final pics from grammar school, and I remember busting a bully kid in the nose with it there. Lastly the right one, one final time, in twelfth grade, playing tackle football with the same sadistic fuck who used to kick me in grammar school. One of the sequence of events which finally got me expelled was staying home to type my big history paper on Vietnam with one finger of my cast-free left hand. Whatevs. It would have happened one way or another.