While all this is going on, I’m on the floor, literally balls out, pleading with them, “Don’t hurt the dog, he’s not my dog, he’s a good dog!” Someone picked up an umbrella and began jousting with Winston. Getting him under control became the first priority. He immediately turned on the rescue squad, baring his teeth, growling, barking, jumping, nipping at their legs. The mood was shattered, not by the EMTs, but Winston. I heard the sirens, getting closer, and knew they were for me. He sat down a few feet away and looked at me. Winston, once he was back in the house, seemed unimpressed by my situation. It just wasn’t the kind of writhing, “please kill me now, lord” pain I expected. This isn’t to say I felt no pain - when the emergency dispatcher suggested I go to the kitchen and get some ice, I declined, preferring to simply lie down in the living room and wait for the professionals.
Whatever the case, I was able to waddle into the house, open the door to let the dog in (leaving it open for the ambulance), pick up the phone and call 911.
But I come bearing good news: Getting spiked in the balls does not hurt as much as you’d think.
#BILL MAC FENCE MOVIE#
It looked like a David Cronenberg movie in there: Where my crotch should be was a small knot, the color of condensed milk, throbbing on a cord, floating in a shallow pool of blood.Īt this point in the story, men turn green and women’s faces are contorted in sympathetic pain. Success! My thighs felt a little damp, so I opened my pants. After a few minutes of planning, and a few more tears and pinches, I finally clambered down off the fence. I heard the fabric of my jeans tear, and felt a pinch, but figured I had avoided the worst. (As an old friend reminded me, I was never that limber to begin with.) and it ends up I’m not as limber as I once was. Then I went to swing my leg over the spikes. I climbed to the top with no problem, and there was a narrow ledge to stand on. Sure, there were theft-deterrent spikes on top of each pole, but they looked clearable. It had been many, many years since I had been called on to climb a fence, but this one didn’t seem so bad. Just one problem: There was a fence with a locked gate standing between me and the door. There were glass doors on the patio, but the glass looked expensive, beveled and etched, and breaking them would simply replace one problem with another. You know, without even checking, that it’s locked. There’s a certain finality to that sound, not too far, I imagine, from the closing of a crypt. If anyone has ever been locked out of their house, they know the wave of nausea that hit when I heard the lock click. He was older, a bit goofy, with a wide turning radius. Winston was not the most graceful of dogs. My charge - a sweet rescue mutt with (I would soon discover) a hair-trigger temper, who trailed my every move in the apparent belief that since I’d given him food once, it could happen again - followed me outside. There were no speakers in the back yard, so I checked out the front patio, leaving the door half open. On the third, a Sunday, I decided to read the papers, drink my coffee and listen to music outside. Especially when I’m asked by friends with nice houses, great record collections and generous wine cabinets. It allowed me to keep telling myself that, while my life was nowhere near middle-class, it could be middle-class adjacent.
#BILL MAC FENCE PROFESSIONAL#
I’d turned into a professional vagabond, a stayer in guest rooms, someone living on the floors and couches of human kindness. It also explains why I was so quick to accept an offer by one of my editors to house- and dog-sit while he and his wife were in Hawaii. In short, it was turning into the kind of year where impaling myself on a fence could be considered a highlight. As for work, I am a music journalist, a career that puts me at the nexus of the recording and publishing industries in other words, at the center of the Internet’s “creative destruction,” working twice as much for half the pay. Over the course of a few months, I had lost an apartment, my Mac died, and my car had reached a point in its life where the mechanic wondered if it was really worth that thousand dollars to replace the master cylinder.
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