Splinters

The worst of the summer crunch is over. I milk menial tasks all day, hide in the cool dark opera basement sending dirty texts, sneak a nap in the seat of the forklift, write stories in my notebook. For us year-round carpenters the crescendo builds to opening day of the opera season, and then we try to do as little as possible for only 40 hours a week til the end of August. Today’s busywork was to clean up the backstage deck, dispatching rusty debris from welding projects; old hardware; cracked, abandoned staging to our dumpster or to the trailer we will empty at the Santa Fe dump.

I grab a wood platform that’s been baking in the sun. The black paint is coming up in scales. It is heavier than I expect, as I pull to lift it I feel an ugly, sliding pinch in the palm of my hand. I freeze, knowing. I look, it’s worse than I expect. A black sliver of plywood is buried deep, about four inches long, an eighth of an inch wide. More than half is stuck in the heel of my right palm. The pointed end of the splinter is pressing against my flesh from the inside, making the skin protrude, but it doesn’t puncture all the way through. It’s so deep the black wood disappears from view inside my skin.

I try to pull it out with my fingers but the splinter does not budge. It’s pounding, pain travels down my forearm, louder and louder. My palm is swelling, turning red around the spear of wood. I bite the end of the splinter trying to wrest it free with my teeth. It doesn’t move, but the external part of the splinter snaps off, leaving the rest lodged. From the metal first-aid box mounted on the shop wall I retrieve the tweezers. I wipe them clean with an alcohol pad, then approach my boss, the master carpenter, whom I cannot stand. He’s a complete dick, but he’s a volunteer firefighter, I assume he has some medical ability, so I thrust my hand heel-forward to him, my fingers curled in.

“Can you help me.” I say matter-of-fact.

His thick mustache twitches at me, annoyed. He looks down at my hand and squints.

“Oh, wow.”

“Can you pull it out?”

He forgets he hates me too and shakes his head. “Nope. You’re going to the clinic.”

I get excited; I get to leave work, out of the blazing sun and into an air-conditioned room, probably get a vial of painkillers –these occupational clinics love to dole out narcotics. Another carpenter drives me to the workers’ comp clinic.

The doctor takes one look at my hand and goes “Jesus Christ! And it’s painted, too. Shit!”

“Just trying to keep things interesting. I know you’re sick of sprained ankles.”

Every summer the opera absorbs hundreds of college apprentices for the season, and we try to break as many of them as possible. This summer so far there’s been 112 injuries. I am 113.

The doc tells me she is going to have to cut the splinter out. I nod. I chat with her and the receptionist, make jokes: my survival tactic. She cleans my hand, the pain dances up my neck and forehead. She cuts a hole in a little blue paper-cloth, drapes it over my palm, I sit on the medical table, legs dangling. I watch with deep interest as she slices open my palm with a shiny scalpel. The skin parts like a sigh and blood seeps out and I am fascinated, when suddenly I feel very hot and dreaming that I am in Manhattan walking down a crowded sidewalk and everyone passing me says my name over and over again. Next thing, I’m laying down on the examination table with a cold wet cloth on my forehead, completely soaked in sweat. My hand is swaddled in an enormous bandage. The doctor laughs.

“I passed out?”

She nods. The doc shakes a plastic vial, making a high rattle. My splinter, saved like a relic of the cross.

I have a penchant for fucked-up splinters. Last time I was free-lancing, doing a carpentry project for a friend. I got a splinter in my right index finger, deep. I tried to pull it out with no luck, and showed it to Beth, who shivered and looked away. “We gotta take you to the hospital.”

“No, I don’t have health insurance.”

I pulled my Leatherman from its belt-sheath and tried to pull the splinter. It was stuck in the meat of the muscle, so much that I couldn’t bend my finger.

“Try it, just yank.”

“No,” Beth was horrified. “I’m gonna puke.”

“I can’t afford the hospital. I can’t deal with registering for indigent-status at the emergency room. It will take forever – this hurts!”

I thought of Killian, who sprained her ankle rollerskating. Our friend, a vet-tech, snuck her into the animal hospital at night and took an X-ray. Luckily her ankle wasn’t broken. I got an idea.

“Let’s go to Holy Holes!” Our friend Calliope’s piercing and tattoo studio.

“Dude, that place is cleaner than the hospital, they have scalpels and forceps. Besides, Calliope will love it!”

Calliope positively reveled in the yucky and perverse. She was an undertaker by trade, and often said without irony that she was on her last life. Blood and guts were of the corporeal world, which she was finished with, she was unflapped by any aspect of the human body. She was thrilled when I presented my swollen, impaled finger to her. She whisked me into a piercing room, sat me on an ancient barber chair, rustled through the vintage medical cabinets and pulled out cotton swabs, gauze pads, iodine, green soap, forceps, scalpel and bandages. She placed it all on a stainless steel tray. She tried to attach forceps onto the protruding nub of lumber in my finger. My whole body jolted.

“Want a Valium?” she asked. I nodded as she reached into her purse. She put on latex gloves and tried again to wrestle my splinter. It wouldn’t budge. The doorbells jangled and she left me to attend to a customer. The Valium kicked in. I giggled, even though it killed.

“I’m gonna have to cut you open a little, ok?”

“Fun. Are you psyched?”

“Umm-hmm.” She bent her head over my finger and sliced. I swallowed a groan.

For two hours Calliope and Wilton, another piercer, took turns trying to get a bite on the splinter in between piercing navels and eyebrows. Other friends came by the shop – Matty and Jen gave it a try too. In pain-delirium I gave it a go when Calliope left to pierce a nipple. I managed to clamp the forceps down on the splinter, and clicked them shut. “Wilton, Wilton!” He came running in with Beth, who had stayed out of the room, feeling ill.

“Look, I got it…pull the fucker out! Pull it!” He yanked, it didn’t move. I howled.

“Harder!” I hissed.

He pulled again, heaving his big shoulders back and I felt it pull free, my own little Excalibur, my little jesus-relic. Blood gushed and Calliope high-fived Wilton, bandaged me up and kissed me on the lips. “All better.”

I read about this bowhead whale caught near Alaska by Inupiat fishermen. They found a piece of 130-year old harpoon stuck in the whale’s flesh. Imagine carrying around something so old and painful inside of you for so long. My friend Kris had cancer everywhere in her body – she told me she knew it was because of the way she metabolized anger. She didn’t die of cancer, she died of suicide – she wanted the choice before the cancer took that away too. Choice is everything.

I’ve held so much anger inside of me, so much sadness. When I was younger I walked through my days spraying sadness like a shotgun blast. As an artist it was expected, to just explode in front of everyone. Creating and destroying in fits and bursts. Some called me angry. They judged. People saw I carried a blackness thick and cancerous inside of me so they stuck theirs inside me too. Like a Spanish bull with all of these broken lances riddling my back and ribs. Plenty of people cannot carry their own darkness, they try to sneak it onto your back. They didn’t understand, it was just grief; it was murder and sickness and loss, and loss. For what exploded out of me I buried ten times more deep inside my skin, all swole-up and festering.

I went out into the desert alone and by the light of the waning moon I pulled each splinter free. Lightning struck the forests and the dry crackling flames engulfed the mountains, who were begging to burn. Ponderosa pines love fire, it’s like sex for the trees, the propagation of a species catalyzed by heat, but people are afraid. It threatened towns and the opera and the national laboratory – all the bullshit, the collected hate of the human race with a half-life of 100,000 years buried in steel drums under tarpaulins. The christians call it rapture but they too woke up at home, feeling angry, abandoned. Ash peppered down on Santa Fe, people kept a packed bag next to their front doors. Can you outrun burning hatred? Festering anger? It is a cleansing fire, a destruction to fertilize creation. I cried to the cholla, the sage and the lonely sad coyotes yipping in the night. I dropped my splinters on the thirsty ground. I still feel the scars, they hurt sometimes, but I am free, I am free.

Author Biography

Cooper Lee Bombardier is a visual artist, illustrator, and self-taught writer and performer. He was raised in the South Shore of Boston. His visual art has most recently appeared in group shows like Meow Wolf in Santa Fe, NM; the 2011 National Queer Arts Festival in San Francisco and the forthcoming ‘zine Faggot Dinosaur. Cooper’s writing has appeared in many periodicals, most recently Pathos Literary Journal, and Original Plumbing; and the anthologies The Lowdown Highway; From the Inside Out, and Trans/Love. He is currently based in Portland, Oregon, where he listens to the trains all night.