Parrothead Ramblings

Sometimes, the truth is
stranger than fiction.

Aside from the usual "How you doin'?" or "May I help you?” do you know what is the most common question I get asked. I wish it was "What was it like to hit that Game 7 walk-off against the Yankees?” or maybe "Just how did you make that first ten million bucks?" No, it's actually "Hey Crime Dog, what the fuck is wrong with your leg?" It ranks just ahead of "How has the fetching Mrs. Crime Dog put up with your worthless ass all these years?” and "Don't you think you've had enough to drink tonight, sir?" The answer to the latter is "no," and to the former is "I have no clue. I just hope she never stops."

So, just what the hell is wrong with my leg after all? Well, gather 'round, kiddies, I only want to tell this once: There I was! April 23, 1983. High-speed pursuit, me in my cop car, alone, against three psycho-crazed angel-dusted killers with automatic weapons. One of them fires a burst through my windshield and, and.......aw, shit. Might as well tell the truth and get it over with: It was a gravity storm.

I was fishing a clear, cold lake in the Sacramento Mountains of southern New Mexico with my best fellow cop buddy, Lee. Off duty. No high-speed pursuit. No psycho-crazed killers. Instead, there was this nice stretch of trout stream we were trying to reach, but we were blocked by cliffs that plummeted straight down to the water.
I made the decision that, rather than go the long way around this particular area of cliffs to reach the bottom; I'd do the manly-man thing and climb down. Lee was less than enthusiastic about my plan. "Yer outta yer fuckin' mind," or words to that effect, as I recall. But I insisted, citing my favorite beer commercial of the era: "You only go around once in life, you have to grab for the gusto. (Neither the first nor the last time that beer has gotten me into deep shit, I might add.) We'll be on the stream in seconds, man!" Truer words never escaped my lips. I covered the distance in, oh, I don't know, about the same amount of time it takes to fling a rock off a 30-foot cliff, because that's how far my ass tumbled into the freezing-ass water of Bonita Creek. Lee managed to find his way out of there and get to a phone to call for rescue. They showed up, and that's when things got really weird.

Now, I know these rescue guys did their best. They were up against it for sure, having to haul my busted-up ass out of there. They had to get me across the stream, which was split by a high spot of boulders and gravel in the middle, then past the spillway of a dam that was running balls to the wall with freezing cold water, down a steep, rocky mountain, to an ambulance about 300' below. Piece of cake. They tied off a rope to a tree above me, ran it across all that water, and tied off the other end to the ambulance. They put me in of those basket-things, with my arms pinioned own so I couldn't move them, and suspended me from the rope. These well-intenders then carried me across the relatively gentle stream into which I had not-so-gently plummeted, and lifted me up high enough to clear the aforementioned high spot. The idea was to belay me from their side, and let me slide down the rope safely above the by now very loud white water of the spillway and into the waiting arms of their fellows on the other side.

Nice plan, if they weren't dumb asses with no concept of what they were doing. As they lifted me up onto that selfsame aforementioned high spot, I could see they had a wee bit too much slack in the rope. "Hey, guys," I said "you have too much slack in the rope. Tighten it up." The two rescuers looked at one another and smiled, as if to say "Ain't that cute? This dipshit cop who managed to fall off a mountain now wants to tell us professionals how to do our jobs." They looked back to me, "No, Crime Dog. You're fine." "No," I said, "I'm not fine. I got a broke-dick leg, and now you geniuses are going to dump my ass right into a gazillion gallons of screaming white water."
"Trust us! We know what we're doing."
"No, trust me" I said. "You're about to fuck up royally. See that lady sitting on that big rock down there about 200 yards?" The fetching Mrs. Crime Dog had arrived, and was watching the proceedings with some interest.
"Yeah. So?"
"Well, that's the fetching Mrs. Crime Dog you're looking at. She can even see from that distance that you are trying to kill me. She's not praying down there, she's calculating how much you two idiots are going to owe her after you drown my ass."
"You're fine, Crime Dog, see you on the other side. Now, off you go!"
SPLASH!
It was at that moment that I learned why fire hoses are so effective at suppressing unruly crowds. Now, if you could just handcuff the unruly rioters, and lower the water temperature to, say 32.5 degrees before you hose them.....well, you see my predicament.
The idiots on the top, suddenly realizing that Mrs. Crime Dog and I were right all along, tried to pull me back out. Guys at the bottom went into "oh shit" mode and tried to pull me on through from the other side. What commenced then was a little game of "Crime Dog Tug-O-War," with me being that ribbon thing they tie in the middle of the rope to help determine the winner. Meanwhile, the white water would hit me and my little basket and try to push us both downstream, then the rope would tense up and whip me back out like a boomerang, just long enough to try and catch my breath, and then plunge me right back in again.

The bottom idiots won the tug-o-war match, pulling my sputtering, choking, now hypothermic ass out of the drink, and took me on a nice, roller coaster ambulance ride off the mountain to the hamlet of Ruidoso. Turns out I had fallen nearly 30 feet, landing on only my right foot. My right ankle compressed into bunch of little pieces, becoming a sort of talus jigsaw puzzle. I had a good doctor, and he spent a great deal of time piecing it back together again, but the deal was done. The Crime Dog was permanently hobbled. Bye-bye law enforcement, hello private investigation!

Now, I have good days and bad days. Everyone familiar with the situation is amazed I'm still walking on it some 22 years later. I'm told that it needs to be replaced with an artificial joint, which is an inviting idea on the bad days. On the good days, I don't even want to think about some guy virtually hacksawing my right foot off.

So, when you see the Crime Dog limping along one of these days, you don't need to ask that quarter-century old question, "What the fuck did you do to your leg?"
I'll settle for "Hey Crime Dog! How you doin?"
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