We were doing trim work at town homes in Owings Mills. In piece work you are trying to work fast as you can to save time. He sets up a cardboard box as his work bench and set up his miter saw and the box collapsed and the saw hit him at a forty-five-degree angle across the back of the hand and almost cut his hand off. It just hung on by tendons, a little meat, maybe. Bill took his shirt and wrapped it and another guy put a tourniquet on it. The medivaced this guy out of there—fifty-five years old, been a carpenter for thirty-five years and fucks up one day. They reattached his hand and he come back to work, had lost some use of his hand, but at least he still had a hand. We told him we’d make a hook for him if we had to. He was out for six months, therapy, infection, all that shit.

Down Arundel Mills they had a lot of platform lifts. These guys had got one of the big gas operated ones with big wheels that you can use out in the dirt and mud and they took it up an incline. They tried to ride it with it extended in the air. They were on the platform when it tilted too far. At a certain grade the platform has nothing under it, is sticking straight back from the hillside. The one guy fell off and the impact killed him and the other one got squashed under it. There is a switch that when you go up an incline it shuts off. They may have disabled it, which some guys do. It’s like those nail guns that people jam wire into and shoot it across the room. People do dumb shit like that. It s not like a movie where the nail shoots, it’s got no power and flies all over the place.

I seen a bricklayer fall fifty feet through a scaffold board and landed on his feet and walked away like nothing happened, not even a sprained ankle and walked off. On another job I saw a guy fall twelve feet off a roof overhang and die.

We were framing a roof and this younger guy had a combination square—a metal ruler with a projection, that comes off the side. He fell off a roof onto dug-up dirt and hopped right back up—he maybe fell fifteen feet, and said he was okay and a couple guys there said, “No you’re not.”

Then he got woozy, the adrenaline wearing off, I guess and they laid him down. He was going into shock. They got him in the ambulance. The combination square went into him, five or six inches into his stomach. You would think it was worse than it was, but he was back to work at the end of the week.

I was working in a gymnasium at Hebville Elementary School off Liberty Road, near I-sic-ninety-five, mainly a dindu school. I was installing windows up near the roof-line. We had had a scaffold built and we had it anchored to the old block walls. The scaffold just ripped the block out of the wall. The scaffold gave way. When I was standing on it my feet were twenty-two feet up when I went. When I was falling down, I grabbed the scaffold, but I went down. The last thing I remember was grabbing the scaffold. I busted my head open, back of my head, was knocked out for a while. My back and my left leg were broken. My pelvic bone was also fractured. The L-three-four and five vertebra were fractured, with multiple herniated disks. I was all jacked up and twisted when you looked at the X-ray. I woke up on the way to Shock Trauma.

They shaved the back of my head and sutured it. I had a severe concussion, head glowing from the Cat Scan injections, got an MRI. They were all really nice people. I get the impression that they were glad to see me walk out of there—more or less hobbling on a walker—but I got the impression a lot of their patients didn’t.

I came to with this nurse’s big tits in my face and I played this slick and asked her if she was an angel and wanted to know if we could go out of here and have a drink.

She said, “I don’t know, we’ll see.”

But, of course, my wife showed up and ruined all that. Every door that closes another opens—there was an opportunity. She had a beautiful face. And she had her big tits in my face—a beautiful woman. I was following her around with my eyes while they had the halo on my head. She had a set of knockers—a beautiful woman. I think she knew what she was doing. It might be how they figure out how hurt you are—stick those big tits in your face. Maybe its a medical test?

I’ve been under pain management the whole time—either in shock or medicated, so I can’t compare it to other painful experiences. I’ve never been this heavy. I want to get the rest of the way off the pain meds—it really is amazing how drugged up they’d keep you if you let them. I need to find out what this current body of mine can do, training it up and establishing a new fitness level.

Fighting Smart: Boxing, Agonistics & Survival