The Lucky Quarter

As much as I hate to say it, it was a dark and stormy night.  I've always hated that opening to a story; it's so overused it's now cliché.  What's worse, it's redundant.  Unless you live in the part of Norway or Alaska where 'day' can last for six months, dark at night is pretty much a given.  If you happen upon a 'bright and sunny night' in say, downtown Seattle, chances are you are heading for your local place of worship to prepare for the impending Apocalypse.  But I digress... let's just say the time was late evening, the weather was crappy, and I was very, very late.

Late is a relative term.  For some people being late means one second after the time they had promised to arrive.  I don't understand those people. To me late has always been a more dynamic concept, depending heavily on what you are suppose to be there for, how many minutes have passed since you were supposed to be there, who will notice your arrival, and how many of your stock excuses for being late said individuals have already heard.

In this particular case, I was supposed to be at my girlfriend's apartment for her birthday.  I was supposed to be there when she got off work at 8 p.m.; the time was 10:30.  At this point in our relationship, Sharon had heard every conceivable (and some inconceivable) excuse for my habitual tardiness.  I think by any definition, I had kissed ordinary run-of-the-mill late bye-bye about an hour ago.

The other thing I had kissed bye-bye an hour ago was my patience.  I definitely was not in the mood to get caught behind Mrs. Hershfelder at the entrance to my girlfriend's apartment complex.  Mrs. Hershfelder was a five-foot, eighty-pound lady who was somewhere in the neighborhood of two hundred years old.  Her floral print dresses hung very loosely off her bony frame, and she made the Walter Matthau character from 'Grumpy Old Men' seem like Mary Poppins by comparison.  The rain had made her current dress, a particularly gaudy pitch-black number with bright yellow flowers, stick awkwardly in places.  Coupled with the black plastic garbage bag she had draped over her head to protect her precious auburn-dyed hair from the rain, I got the vague impression of a flamboyantly-gay, midget Grim Reaper.  At that moment, she was carrying two separate oversized bags of groceries, one in each arm, while awkwardly trying to place her key in the lock to the door at the front of the apartment complex.

"Let me help you with your bags, Mrs. Hershfelder."  I offered as politely as I could manage, trying to take one bag from her arm.

"Keep your damn hands to yourself!"  Mrs. Hershfelder responded defiantly, shaking off my helping hand.  "I didn't need your help to raise 3 kids, and I certainly don't need your help to get in my own building."

As fate would have it, she next proceeded to drop her keys, now slippery from the rain, onto the ground in front of the door.  When she bent over to grab the keys, a gust of wind took hold of the garbage bag on her head and blew it directly into my face.  She made a few vain attempts at picking up the keys, still holding her groceries as if to prove a point. 

"For the love of God!" I muttered to myself, throwing off the plastic bag in disgust.  My small modicum of patience now exhausted, I unceremoniously grabbed her keys from the ground as she continued to fumble about.  In one deft motion I stepped in front of her, unlocked the door, and flippantly tossed her keys over my shoulder without looking.  I quickly opened the door partway, slid through the opening, and allowed the door to slam shut behind me, leaving Mrs. Hershfelder outside the building.  She didn't want any help...

As I bounded up the staircase to Sharon's apartment two steps at a time, I wracked my brain for a new excuse for being late.  I was pretty sure that beating my roommate Tommy in NHL 93 on Sega for the 15th straight game (my personal record) wouldn't fly very well.  Realistically, I had only one shot:  She was a nurse, and she was always getting stuck at work four or five hours past her scheduled shift.  With a little luck, she was caught up in the emergency room, and would never know how badly I had screwed up.

Reaching the top of the stairs, I pulled out my lucky quarter out of my jean pocket, gave it a kiss for luck, and screwed up my courage to knock on the door.  Good old lucky quarter - you've never failed me.

Midway between my first and second knock, the door briefly opened three inches.  I caught a quick glimpse of my very angry girlfriend, and then the door was vehemently slammed shut in my face.

"Wonderful…" I muttered ironically to myself, quickly turning around to whip my lucky quarter down the stairwell as hard as I could.

I believe I caught the first glimpse of what would soon change my life in the middle of my throwing motion, soon enough to realize what I was about to accidentally do, but too late to stop it…

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Mrs. Hershfelder had finally made it up to the landing to her apartment (located down the stairs from my girlfriend), still valiantly struggling with her two bags of groceries.  Quickly taking into consideration the very narrow stairwell, I immediately realized the likelihood of my hitting Mrs. Hershfelder with the quarter based on my current point of aim was unacceptably high.  As Mrs. Hershfelder was already unlikely to be politely predisposed towards me for leaving her out in the rain, I had serious doubts about her ability to take a quarter hard off the chest philosophically.  In order to avoid the impending disaster, I desperately tried to change my point of aim at the last second to the ceiling above her head.

I remember my baseball coach, in a fit of pique over me walking three straight batters one inning, once angrily declaring "The safest place to be when you're pitching is wherever you're aiming!" I suppose a logical corollary to that statement is "The worst place to be when I'm throwing something is wherever I'm trying to avoid."  By raising my point of aim, I had successfully avoided hitting Mrs. Hershfelder in the chest, only to viciously bounce the quarter right off of her temple.

The next sequence of events happened like it was in slow motion.  Stunned by the quarter to the temple, Mrs. Hershfelder staggered backwards, coming dangerously close to the precipice of the first stair leading down from her stairwell landing.  In a last ditch effort to help, I frantically bounded down the stairs towards her three steps at a time.  Yet again, my almost mythical lack of physical coordination was working against me.  By my third downwards stride, I lost my balance, and started hurtling out of control down the stairway.

Mrs. Hershfelder regained her own composure to avoid falling down the stairs, only to have my sprawling body give her a shoulder check that would have made Bob Probert proud.  She was knocked off her feet into the air (I weigh 220 pounds on a good day), and thudded into the wall face first with her arms and legs spread wide.  In the process the grocery bags were dislodged violently from her grasp, sending cans of Campbell's Tomato soup everywhere, making a horrible racket in the process.

My momentum carried me down the second flight of stairs leading from Mrs. Hershfelder's apartment landing, and I arrived at the bottom of those stairs in a facedown heap.  I briefly heard the sound of someone tumbling down the stairs behind me, and distinctly heard the horrible crackling sound of bone breaking.  As I lay there prone on the ground something landed on top of me, knocking the air completely out of me.  Oh dear God, please don't let that be what I think it is! 

Mrs. Hershfelder's groan, coming from within a few inches of my ear, confirmed my worst fears.  How in the world could this get any worse?  As if to answer my silent query, I heard the sound of footsteps treading ominously down the stairs to the scene of the debacle. 

"JONATHAN JACOB – WHAT IN THE HELL ARE YOU DOING!?!?"  I heard in the unmistakable sound of my girlfriend's normally dulcet voice.  Apparently Sharon had heard the veritable explosion of loud random noises coming from outside her apartment, and had reconsidered her decision to stay behind closed doors.  At that moment, I couldn't help but notice that my lucky quarter had landed heads up roughly a foot from my rather precarious predicament.  Worst damned Lucky Quarter EVER!

"John, you'd better have a good explanation for…" my girlfriend's voice trailed off into a stunned silence.  Ah, that pause can only mean she just rounded the corner to look down the second set of stairs.  Core meltdown in three… two… one…

"OH MY GOD!"  Her voice must have gone up two full octaves in pitch.  Ah, there it is!  Then, with a note of deliberate calm, "Mrs. Hershfelder, are you alright?"  Oh crap, Sharon just went into nurse mode instead of losing it - Mrs. Hershfelder must look pretty bad.

Under normal circumstances, Mrs. Hershfelder has a grating nasal voice that can be heard from the neighboring apartment building.  On this occasion, her voice was barely more than a weak whisper in response:

"I… I… can't feel my legs!"

Immediately after speaking, I could feel Mrs. Hershfelder's body go completely limp.  My stomach dipped suddenly to the left and then attempted some sort of a barrel roll.

"It'll be alright," I attempted to calm myself.  "Sharon's a nurse; she'll take care of everything."

The next thing I knew I was looking into Sharon's adorable blue-green eyes.  She had dropped down to the ground to look me dead in the face.

"John, I don't have time to yell at you right now," She started in the almost patronizingly matter-of-fact voice of the professional nurse.  "Mrs. Hershfelder is unconscious on your back, and may have a spinal cord injury.  I'm going to run upstairs to call 911.  Listen to me very carefully, this is very important… UNDER NO CIRCUMSTANCES are you to move AT ALL!"

I had been dating Sharon long enough to know that when she used that tone of voice, there was no arguing with her.  Unfortunately, in the process of beating Tommy at Sega hockey, I had finished a 7-11 Super Big Gulp.  I don't know the size of the average bladder, but I'm pretty sure it pales in comparison to the sixty-four ounces of caffeine goodness that is the Super Big Gulp.  What's worse, Mrs. Hershfelder's weight was pushing the floor directly into my bladder.  The strain was already beginning to be unbearable.

"But Sharon…"  I began lamely.

Sharon cut me off before I could get out a second word.

"Damn it John, if you move you could paralyze her permanently!"

Properly chagrined, I decided that under the circumstance I would have to wet myself if worse came to worst.

While Sharon hurriedly made her way up the stairs back to her apartment to call 911, the cell-phone in my pocket began to happily beep-out a digitized version of the theme song to TV's 'The Jeffersons'.  As my right index finger was already touching the button to turn on the speaker-phone option through my corduroys, I decided to risk the small movement of pressing it on.

"John!" a tinny version of Tommy's excited voice began.

"Yes?"  I replied in a defeated tone, letting out a sigh in the process.

"Dude, John, you would not believe the day I'm having!"

"Oh really?" I replied sardonically. "Try me…"