The History of My Bad Back

The first fateful injury to my back occurred during the winter of 1960. My brother Billy, ten years older than me, took advantage of the fact that there had been but negligible snowfall before Christmas to gull me into thinking that Santa Claus would not be visiting our neighborhood that year.

“Looks like he won’t be able to drive his sleigh up to our house this year, Timmy” he told me dolefully.

I was panic stricken. That was the year I had pleaded like Clarence Darrow at the Scopes Monkey Trial for my parents to get me a Mr. Machine -- a plastic, wind up take-apart mechanical man with a red top hat. Mom said no they wouldn’t get such a foolish thing for me -- but that Santa might bring it, if I ate my peas. I hated peas and wouldn’t touch them if they were covered in gold. But I wanted that Mr. Machine pretty bad, so I shoveled in the peas, which seemed to maliciously turn up at every pickin’ dinner that winter, gagging all the while.

Now it appeared that my nauseating sacrifice had been in vain! Luckily, it began snowing heavily a week before Christmas, and my mother caught Billy telling me his sacrilegious fibs -- she batted him upside the head with the kitchen broom and told him he’d have to take my sisters and I tobogganing at the Columbia Golf Course to make amends.

At the intersection of Central and the St. Anthony Parkway, the Course was a hilly preserve carved from the nearby ‘Nordeast’ Minneapolis railyards. Billy was a member, so he drove us over the next Saturday and dutifully lugged the family toboggan, made of cheap flexible plywood and padded with a thin veneer of foam rubber, up the steepest grade he could find and then pushed us off into the void.

The ride down had achieved Mach One speed when the toboggan crashed over a protruding rock, sending a shock up my spine that turned into a persistent dagger thrust. When I got home I complained about the pain in my lower back to mom, so she let me lay on the living room couch the rest of the day, with an electric heating pad underneath me, and plied me with St. Joseph’s chewable baby aspirin. I hobbled around a few days like Walter Brennan in a John Wayne western before straightening up and getting my spinal mojo back. Back then, going to our family pediatrician for a backache was considered pretty wimpy, and expensive (he charged fifteen bucks per visit.) So I never had it diagnosed or X-rayed. Same deal with my teeth -- they were as crooked and impacted as old gravestones in a cemetery, but boys didn’t need braces; they would eventually get their teeth straightened out from the knocks they received playing football.

My back behaved itself for the next several years, as I recall, right through high school. It stayed loyal and supportive during my attendance at the Ringling Clown College in 1971. But then while the circus was playing Denver in the fall of 1972 it stabbed me in the back again.

I was in the center ring gag that season -- the only First of May allowed into the august company of the likes of Mark Anthony, Dougie Ashton, Lazlo Donnert, Prince Paul, and the ineffable Swede Johnson. It was a bakery gag. Dougie and Swede were bride and groom, respectively, coming to inspect their wedding cake. I had a bit part where I got a pie in the face and

was knocked down by a tray of pastries carried by Prince Paul, a dwarf.

That first show in Denver when I took my pratfall something popped in my lower back and I couldn’t spring back up with my usual energy. Mark Anthony helped me onto my feet and I finished the gag in agony. As soon as I could get my makeup off I hobbled out of the arena and hailed a cab to the nearest ER. The doctor X-rayed my sacroiliac and pronounced a bruised coccyx. I would have to stay in bed for a week. At the time I was a member of the American Guild of Variety Artists, and they paid all the medical bills and reimbursed me for my week’s lost pay. I loved that union, and was mortified when old man Feld managed to evict it from the circus several years later by offering his own health plan for the clowns -- which, I understand, was less than stellar.

A few years later, hale and hearty once again, I was an LDS missionary in Thailand, doing clown shows under the auspices of the Thai Red Cross in hospitals, schools, and prisons. But in the dusty town of Khon Kaen up in the Isaan region of Thailand, I bent over to tie my shoes and my back once again turned Quisling. I couldn’t straighten up. And I had a clown show to do at the local prison in an hour!

I had my companion, Elder Day, girdle me up in several miles of Ace Bandage, and somehow managed to give the prisoners 45 minutes of buffoonery, while gritting my teeth and muttering “riddhi pagliacci” over and over again.

After a few days bed rest I was as good as new. I didn’t bother going to a doctor or getting X-rayed again. It just didn’t make any sense -- here I was in top physical form (I rode a Chinese made cast iron bike that weighed half a ton if it weighed an ounce for miles every day) and yet my back had seized up like I was Methuselah. Well, I was too busy with my performing and proselytizing duties to worry about it -- so I blew it off. I had no more episodes during my two years in Thailand.

A few years later, when I was courting my wife Amy in Williston, North Dakota, I was trying to impress her with a few tricks on old Dr. Maisey’s trampoline in his backyard. He was the Branch President of the LDS Church in Williston, and took a kindly interest in my wooing of Amy Anderson, so he let us use his house and yard whenever we wanted. And wouldn’t you know it, my back played me false once again just after completing a double forward somersault on the trampoline. Amy had to assist me down and drive me back to my basement apartment, where she nursed me gallantly for the next several days.  

The next fifteen years were full of sciatica as we married and raised a family. There is a pernicious tradition in the LDS Church that the Elder’s Quorum is to function as a volunteer cartage company for every member moving their residence. And let me tell you, most LDS members own at least one piano. And often two. As a true blue Mormon, I participated in dozens of these activities, and after each one my back gave out on me. Amy had me going to one chiropractor after another. One told me I had a bone spur on my fifth vertebrae; another used a set of electrified chopsticks to poke me like a fondue tidbit; and another, who was enormously fat, used to sit on me when I was spreadeagled on his table -- I felt like roadkill. None of them did me much good. The only relief I could find was to have my little daughter Virginia walk up and down my back. Finally, in the summer of 1990, I threw in the towel and refused to lift so much as a box of Kleenex anymore.

I steadfastly refused to even shovel a single snowflake off of the sidewalk, and if my kids were too bone lazy to go out and do it, den by Yumpin Yimminy dat snow could stay vhere it vas until Syttende Mai!

And after that, boys and girls, the volcano I called my spinal cord became blissfully dormant. Until just this morning, when I got out of bed and nearly collapsed into a disjointed pile of misery. I took a mega dose of Ibuprofen and immediately sat down to write this -- the sad history of my bad back. Which is going to need a new chapter. Dammit.