So, I’m 5 years old. My mom liked to go to Las Vegas & play Roulette for hours. She also liked Joshua Trees. On the way, she made my dad drive into the desert a mile or so to take photos standing next to them. I had a habit of wandering around the desert & handling every animal or insect I saw. It wasn’t very smart of my parents not to keep an eye on me & let me walk around.
I found a snake under a bush. At the time, I didn’t know what it was; I just thought he had a weird tail. I picked him up & let him crawl around my face for several minutes, then my dad yelled, “Hey put that thing down.” I said, “But he likes me.” My dad yelled, “He’s poisonous, he can kill you.”
I put him back under the bush. My dad kept shaking his head & mumbling, “crazy kid” all the way back home. I found out later, it was a Mohave Green - one of the most deadly Rattlesnakes. To this day, I don’t know why he didn’t bite or even rattle. We were many hours from any hospital & I was a very small child, so I doubt I would have survived a bite.
When I was 9, my dad had some type of door-to-door job, Sometimes he’d take me wth him - maybe to give my mom a break. He had an old De Soto. I’d sit in the car, bored while he knocked on doors. After he parked, he’d say, “Don’t touch anything.” Yeah…right.
He parked on a hill. As soon as he was out of sight, I played with that push-button starter; I liked how it made the whole car shake like a carnival ride. When I played with that pull-out parking brake, it flew forward & the car started rolling down the hill - fast. I jumped into the back seat. The car slammed into a tree. A few minutes later, a cop showed up & was yelling at my dad, saying “How stupid could you be, leaving a child in a car, someone could have been killed.”
At 16, I was swimming at the beach. I liked to go far from shore, where the boats were. I felt something bump my foot. I swam to shore & when I walked on the sand, people were gasping & pointing at my foot. I looked at it & there was an open flap on top that gushed blood with every step; likely a small shark bit me & I didn’t feel it in the cold water. I got to my car, wrapped the foot in a towel & drove home with my other foot. When I got home, I wrapped it wth masking tape I found in the garage. It healed perfectly; maybe the salt water disinfected it?
(Skip this one if you’re squeamish)
A year later, I was playing handball with my brother against the side of the house barefoot. When I ran up to hit a ball near the wall, I heard a scraping sound & my brother yelling “Oh, s–t.” Somehow, a nail went through the side of my big toe & partly into the toe next to it. I started to pull it out but it was rusted & broke off. When I started pulling it from the other side, it broke off again, leaving the middle of it in my toe. I went to the garage & found a brand new nail & pushed the piece out. I poured peroxide into the hole & put a band aid over each side. It also healed perfectly. Later, a friend mentioned “Tetanus.” I said, “What’s that?”
All the way to The Red Lobster ‘Restraint’.