On Concussion and Stolen Moments

Sometimes I meet someone on the streets of my town who strikes up a conversation like an old friend. At some point, I interrupt to say I don’t actually know who they are. This is followed by an explanation that a severe concussion in 2018 wiped a lot of memories from my mind, which is true, and that is why I don’t remember them, which sometimes isn’t.

Occasionally, I will feign ignorance because I remember, either vaguely or lucidly, that this person knows something embarrassing about my past that I don’t want recalled in daylight. Rarely, but it’s been known to happen, I remember this person as such an egregious asshole that I don’t want them to know that I ever knew they existed. More often, I vaguely recognise this person but am fuzzy on how I know them and completely vacant as to their name.

Sometimes, though, I am genuinely meeting them for the first time. In my own mind’s eye, at least. I’m struck with a profound sadness at meeting someone very cool who spent some formative, even intimate, experience with some version of myself I don’t recall. I’ve also experienced profound relief upon hearing a story apparently involving me that is so inane that I assume the memory ran away from my brain out of pure embarrassment.

What I’m saying here is that concussion has its swings, and it has its roundabouts. When concussion closes a door, it opens a window.

I’ve been concussed five times in my life, to varying degrees of severity.

The first was also the worst.

I was a 14-year-old student at a strict Catholic school in a country town. Not one of the fancy ones. The kind that heavily subsidises tuition for ‘lower-class’ (and I don’t just mean in the socioeconomic sense) students to keep the numbers of the faithful up. I was constantly reminded of my obligation to exist is some perpetual state of gratitude that one such as I was privileged enough to be educated equally among the pious and the elite.

Mrs. Prendergast, my social studies teacher, didn’t feel any such egalitarian sensibilities. She would separate us into groupwork along certain lines. I never did know if the reason I was always among the same group of troublemakers was because of who our parents were or because of how much they put into the offertory plate on Sundays.

As rowdy kids do, we had short attention spans and tended to act up in class. During one lesson, we were handed a large pile of half-inch thick women’s magazines to cut articles out of for whatever the subject of the day was. These magazines were the staple of newsstands when I was growing up. They were dense, glossy affairs on heavyweight paper stock. Inside the covers were a multitude of slim advertising inserts that seemed, to my adolescent mind, perfect for giving my friend Chris a cheeky swipe over the back of his head when he wasn’t looking. I and the parts of the group who were not named Chris laughed hysterically at my prank. Chris glared at me with his best vengeance-shall-be-mine look just before somebody shot me it the back of the head with a .44 Magnum, the kind Dirty Harry uses. The world’s most powerful handgun.

At least, that’s what it felt like as the impact launched me from my chair to the floor. Looking up in a daze, I saw the towering figure of Mrs. Prendergast leering down at me with a hateful look in her eyes, bellowing down to the semi-conscious child at her feet. She was a hefty woman and, in her fist, was the whole half-inch magazine rolled so tightly into a roll that it now resembled — and had the weight of — a policeman’s truncheon.

I can speak with some authority on this comparison. Four years from now, I would be doubled over in pain on a deserted roadside after feeling the full force of a nightstick to the stomach after a local highway patrolman justifiably decided he’d taken just about enough of my shit. As I knelt in the dirt gasping for breath and trying not to throw up, I thought he still had a gentler manner than Mrs. Prendergast.

“How do YOU like it?” she menaced, before proceeding with the class as if nothing had happened. She was right, in a way. In my town, absolutely nothing happened when you beat the shit out of a kid.

As Chris and the rest of the group helped me back into my chair, their faces had turned white from fear. As a disciplinary measure, I suppose it worked. The boys were pretty well-behaved for the rest of the year.

Me, I don’t really remember much of it. I remember spending a lot of time between classes wandering the school grounds aimlessly and feeling sad for no reason I could name. Small towns in the eighties didn’t know the word ‘depression’ so, to my teachers and parents, I just became the ‘mopey’ one.

The next couple of concussions passed without serious incident.

At 17, I caught an overinflated soccer ball of a freezing field with exactly the wrong part of my head and was out for around thirty seconds, though I felt no time pass between hitting the dirt and getting back up again and couldn’t understand why everyone looked so suddenly concerned. I slept for fourteen hours and woke up fine.

At 23, a pickup truck ran a give-way sign and trashed my first motorcycle and me along with it. It was 9:06 a.m. I know that because the crash shattered the pearl-white Seiko watch that my family gave me on my 21st birthday. When I lay down to sleep after spending the day getting patched up in Emergency for the injuries to my hands and legs, I noticed a solid mass of dried blood at the back of my head. Morbidly, I reached into my thick hair and traced the line of a two-inch tear in my occipital bone. Too tired to deal with it, I rolled onto my side and figured it wasn’t as bad as it seemed, and it seemed like I was right.

We will come back to concussion number four but first I want to tell you what happened a year ago. Honeymooning in Scotland, we both woke up in the Edinburgh darkness at the exact unfortunate moment. I reached for a cuddle just as she flung her head back in a half-sleep state. Bang. Concussion number five. Sometimes, I ask why we never visited the National Gallery of Scotland.

“You weren’t feeling well” she gently tells me.

But back to number four. We were playing soccer on a concrete rooftop basketball court in the middle of the city, and I was frustrated. I’d chosen a specific type of New Balance runner than had extra hold designed for stability on rough terrain. They were great for running the parkland trails near my house, but too grippy for concrete. So partly it was the shoes and partly I was feeling my age. I’d already let two slip through the net that would never have gotten by me twenty years ago, when I lived for this.

After twenty years, the reflexes weren’t the same, but the competitiveness was just as strong. Rushing too hard and too fast for a loose ball, I didn’t see Joe was also going for it. Joe was one of the kindest, sweetest souls I have ever met. Thoughtful and soft-spoken, with a rare easy humour. He would always have a joke to tell, but they were never dirty or profane or demeaning.

But Joe was also Samoan.

Samoans come in only two sizes. The first size is roughly that of a normal human. The other is built more like a mountain. Joe was the latter. I bounced off Joe so hard that my body inverted, my head flung back beyond the parallel to the point where I must have looked like Wile E Coyote piledriving the desert floor.

I knew something was wrong at the pub after the game. The first hint should have been that I was drinking Australian beer, which I never do, but I was distracted by Joe profusely apologizing for something that was entirely my fault and insisting that I really should see a doctor. I lied and promised I would. Though later, laying in a hot bath with a whiskey in my hand, I realized maybe Joe was right.

Because I had completely forgotten the name [blank].

I hadn’t forgotten people named [blank], mind you. One of my best friends was named [blank]. I remembered everything about him. The day we met. Our many wild nights. The name of his wife. The model of every exotic car he’d ever owned. But whenever I tried to recall his name, my mind skipped like a scratched record.

Uneasy, I ran through a catalogue of everyone else I knew named [blank]. There was [blank] Cheong. He was my go-to for transport engineering. Medium build, thin-rimmed glasses, first child on the way. But what was his first name? I tried again.

[blank] was a drinking buddy. We’d tried Hibiki together for the first time. He bought me that Australian beer. So sad things didn’t work out with that English girl. Try again.

Got it. [blank] Kesey wrote the One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. Okay, I’m more a fan of the movie but that still counts. And there was [blank] Done. God, what an awful artist. Why couldn’t I forget his paintings, instead of his name?

The name [blank] had been wiped from my brain.

The catscans can back clear. Ish. Sometimes, the doctor explained, you can feel the effects of a concussion, even if they don’t show up on a machine.

Like I said, concussions have their swings and their roundabouts.

Most of the memories I’m missing, I don’t have much use for anyway. I had two bad relationships in my life. I remember they were bad, and parts of why they were bad, but I don’t really remember all of it. Or, more accurately, how I felt about it, unless I read it in another me’s journals. I don’t recall much about the years 2002 to 2005, except that my friend Georgie and I saw Springsteen for the first time and rocked out like we were 25 again. Bruce sang “Rosalita”.

Sometimes I forget things closer than that. Over dinner, my wife will say, “Doesn’t this place remind you of that little place in Kyoto we went to?” and I will nod and smile until I’ve no choice than to admit I really don’t remember it. Kyoto was four months ago.

But, mostly, it’s fine. I remember the cherry blossoms, and the friend I made from Osaka. I remember the cocktail bar he took me to, and promising I’d never tell the name of it, because he didn’t want it to get so popular that he couldn’t get in any time he liked.

But I also remember reading an interview where Elvis Costello said he wouldn’t be singing “Oliver’s Army” live anymore. People were offended by a line in it. Elvis understood and even sympathised with why they would be and would rather never sing the song again than play a neutered or censored version of it. I got that, but it made me sad because I’d never seen Elvis Costello play live and, if I did, I wouldn’t get to hear him play my favourite of his songs.

Years later, the sadness would return when, going through a box of ticket stubs from every concert I’d see since INXS came to my hometown on the Listen Like Thieves tour, I found it.

ADMIT ONE: Elvis Costello, 8:00 P.M. 15 Oct 2009. No smoking.

I didn’t dare look up the setlist.