My best friend in kindergarten was Elizabeth Steele. Being overly clever at age five, I nicknamed her Lizard Ironpants. Poor Lizzie became irate upon hearing her new moniker. She picked up the object closest to her and threw it at me. Unfortunately it was half a brick and it hit me smack in the face. I have a true memory of this incident. My mother’s retelling does not reinforce it. She wasn’t even home at the time. My father was. He and his friend Winton were tearing out the back porch of our house in preparation for a new screened in version.
I walked through the yards, home to Daddy with my hand over my nose and mouth. This became a familiar hand gesture throughout my childhood. Placing my hand over the injured area to stem the flow of blood.
My nose was broken, my upper lip split. I don’t know what happened to Lizard Ironpants. I don’t think anyone came down on her too viciously; her homelife left something to be desired, according to my reinforced memory files. Something looms in a forgotten place in my brain about guns with real bullets and a suicide in Lizzie’s house. And there’s a faint memory of Lizzie showing up at the front door at “six o’clock in the morning, for God’s sake, with no shoes on and it was snowing.”
Shortly after the Lizard Ironpants incident, but long enough for my face to have healed, my father bought a Bell & Howell movie camera. He missed a few classic shots of me. Like when I was sitting on the headrest of the front seat of my mother’s 1960 Chevy Impala convertible.