In 1978 I was in seventh grade. I had been playing third base for my little league team. A line drive snags in the web of my heavy leather mitt, that long throw across the diamond sails over the first baseman's head toward the other team's dugout. A runner comes around and scores. It's my fault. My dad hangs on the backstop with anticipation. Mom's at home washing the dishes, or putting ointment on my little sister's diaper rash.
        A few days after one of the games I complained to my mom about an acute pain in my neck. "It's nothing," she said. "You probably strained it playing ball." I didn't remember any incidents or injuries that could have caused this particular pain though my knee still stung from a rugged slide into second. And my ego still hurt from the whomping our team took in the last game. Each day the pain got worse until I couldn't get out of bed. Mom! I yelled. This was before the "fallen and can't get up" commercial. This was when I still had surfer long hair, this is before I discovered punk rock. My favorite band was Cheap Trick singing 'Mommy's all right, Daddy's all right // they just seem a little weird.'
        The doctor said, "You probably strained a muscle playing baseball." Still I couldn't recall any injury. "Let's try physical therapy." Each day the pain got worse. "It may get worse, before it gets better," they said. I couldn't turn my head from side to side, and I couldn't lift up from a laying down position. The therapist was nice enough. She had this industrial vibrating massager and gelatin (probably ultrasound) which she worked into my back and shoulders. I wish I had that thing now to try on my girlfriend. That really hurts, I told her. I sensed that she thought I was a wimp. Then SNAP! The therapist heard it, my mom heard it, and I felt it. The quick crisp snap of my neck breaking. Of course I screamed hysterically and they rushed me to the adjacent hospital and strapped me into traction: attached weights to a harness around my head that kept my neck immobile. 
        All they could tell me was that my neck was broken. The doctors discarded the little league injury theory, but didn't offer a new theory to eplace it. Why this perfectly healthy 12 year old boy was laying immobile in the hospital was a total mystery. Doctors and nurses stood over me with puzzled expressions. They put me in the children's ward because misery loves company. I shared the room with tonsillectomies, and mummy-bandaged burn victims. One kid (visiting his sister in the next ward) felt so sorry for me that he gave me a first edition Iron Man comic. I got to know the bedpan and fear the sponge bath. The doctors ran tests and I was known for the months of June, July and August as The Human Pin Cushion of Room 842B. Every few hours a nurse or technician came at me with a needle. The spearpoint skin pop, the plunger forces or draws some burning liquid into or from my bloodstream. If they could find a vein, they took blood three times a day, shot me full of radioactive isotopes and plugged in IV's. One of the IV's left this now faint quarter-inch scar on my left hand. I spent most of my time watching TV through these prism glasses (since I had to lie flat in the traction.) The prisms also turned the lights into rainbows.
        Eventually the doctors figured out that I had a rare blood disease called Eosynophyllic Granuloma. A biopsy left my third cervical vertebra completely destroyed. And so they installed what is known as a halo cast: a steel halo that orbits your skull and is actually bolted into the bone with four bolts: two right at the temples and two in the back. They shaved my head. It was definitely the first punk hairstyle at school. Steel rods came down from the halo secured onto a plaster cast that covered my entire torso; I still have abrasion scars from where the cast rubbed on my hip bones. The worst part was that the bolts had to be tightened once a week with a two foot long torque wrench. Turning the bolt felt like, what I imagine diving too deep in the ocean feels like. My head crushing like an aluminum can.
        The halo did offer mobility. I could walk around like Frankenstein, small children burst into tears at the sight of me. Luckily, radiation destroyed the remnants of the tumor (and god knows what else). The first day of seventh grade was a trip. My mom worked at a key punch factory sweatshop run by Ross Perot, so I had to ride the handicap bus to school. I'm not sure where my dad was. I shared the ride with Special Ed students drooling and screaming in wheelchairs. I got through the year with successively smaller braces until in the end I only had to wear a foam-rubber whiplash collar. I was glad to be rid of the braces because there were sweaty, dank and musty places on my pubescent body that hadn't been washed in a long time.
        Many years later (after causing my mother insurmountable worry about my neck with slam dancing and skateboarding and jumping off buildings into pools) I got a teaching credential from the university and started working as a substitute teacher. One of my long-term assignments was to teach Special Ed. These were the same kids that I shared the bus with in seventh grade. They ranged from droolers and screamers who had to be fed through a tube to the mentally deranged. There was a kid named Angel who would follow me around the campus. He would wait for me by the parking lot in the morning and stand outside the teachers'lounge at lunch time. The other teachers thought it was cute that I had a follower. Mr. J, your secret admirer is outside. Angel looked like a normal kid, except his mother cut his thick black hair with a cereal bowl template. Angel could do some schoolwork and carry a conversation. I actually liked him better than the other teachers. Yet, there was something a little strange about him. His disability was, I suspect, some kind of sociopathic disorder. He was the kind of kid who would creep right into your personal space like a pesky vine creepy crawling on your nerves. He scrutinized every missing button on my clothes, he distinguished freckles from moles from warts. He noted new wrinkles, and my first gray hair. He wanted me for a friend, invited me to jazz concerts and wanted me to take him somewhere, anywhere, away from his home on the weekend. I never did. His family were Jehovah Witness. He was always talking about jesus or god, mostly the devil. Once he said, "If I saw the Devil, I would kill him."
        "Would he go to heaven?" I replied.
        "No he would go to Hell," he said. Angel's voice was even creepy, kind of a whisper, like everything he said was a secret between me and him.
        "Why don't you just tell the Devil to go home?" Angel didn't laugh, absorbing what I said like it was gospel rather than an attempt at humor.
        We had the same conversation only slightly varied each day. "Hey," I said, "If you killed the Devil, that would be murder, and you would go to hell too."
         He puzzled over statements like that for a long time. He took them too seriously. One day he whispered to me, "I think you're the Devil." He was dead serious. He pointed at the twin scars on my forehead above my temples, "That's where you cut off your horns."
        I smiled and replied, "That's where they cut off my halo."

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