I bet that’s a title you never thought you’d read in a newsletter like this. But I’d also bet that it at least piques your interest just a little bit too. When Eric and I were discussing the theme for this issue, I casually texted him that title and immediately got back a LMAO message. I followed that up with a text saying, “I never thought a time would come when it would be fit to tell that story, but here we are.”
So yeah, I had my thumb broken playing titty twister at bible school.
It was the summer of 1988. School had been out for a few weeks and my days had been filled with various adventures. My friends who lived on my road spent the days riding our bikes from one end to the other during the day, and my evenings were spent on the front porch watching the bug zapper do its thing. But one of the summer traditions in my life was spending several weeks attending bible school.
If you’re not familiar with what bible school is, let me give you a brief rundown. During the summer months when school is out, most churches host a week of bible school. This takes place in the late evenings and is usually made up of some kind of class, followed by a craft project, and the whole week usually is part of a theme of some kind.
My Mom was all about being at church as much as possible, so whether I wanted to attend bible school or not didn’t matter. I was going. And not only was I going to bible school at our church, but she would arrange for me to go with my cousins to bible school at their churches as well. And that is where this tale takes place.
I have an older cousin named Stevie. You may remember him as the protagonist from the Appalachian Christmas Carol audio presentation. While he could be a real piece of work, his mother has always been a wonderful lady. And back in those days she was a Sunday School teacher at her church. It was a no-brainer that I was going to be going to their bible school.
The week of bible school was ok as far as bible school goes. I can’t remember much about what the theme was, or what the classes entailed, or what the crafts were like. What I can remember though is my cousin Stevie picking on me the whole week. And Stevie encouraged his friends to pick on me too.
Their main modes of attack were the classic bully gimmicks like noogies, Indian burns, and flicking my ears. Stevie took things up a notch by adding in titty twisters whenever he could. You know, where you pinch someone’s nipple and twist real hard. The giver gets a kick out of watching the receiver dance around in pain, while the receiver…well, the receiver just dances around in pain.
I didn’t do much to fight back against this bullying since there were three of them and just one of me. But when we got to the final night, that changed. Stevie’s friends left after the final night party, and I seized on the opportunity to get a little revenge. While standing in the parking lot, I grabbed a handful of Stevie’s nipple and twisted it with everything I had.
The look of horror on his face was matched only by the scream of pain he let out. Now I don’t know if it was the pain or the thought that I had the audacity to fight back against his bullying, but either way, there was fire in his eyes as he drew back a fist. He swung for the fences at my face, but I managed to sway to save my face, and threw up a hand to block his shot. Unfortunately, his shot landed full force against my thumb on the hand I threw up to block it. My thumb bent backward in a way that God never intended.
Fortunately for me, his mom came on the scene at that point, and Stevie’s attack ended just as quickly as it had begun. He cursed under his breath in the backseat of the car as they drove me to my house. I got out of the car and headed into the house with the satisfaction of what I had done. But then, the pain in my thumb set in. And it was a throbbing pain.
I told my folks about it, avoiding telling the whole story, but they got the point and took me to get checked out. As the doctor pulled and prodded my thumb, he could tell there was real pain there from my reactions. An x-ray confirmed his suspicions of a broken thumb. A small cast was applied from my thumb to a couple of inches past my wrist. Wearing a cast is inconvenient enough on its own, but the timing of getting this one was really bad.
Two days after the cast was applied, our family left on a two-week road trip to Canada and Nova Scotia. It was part vacation and part business trip for my dad. I had just gotten a handheld video game for the trip and now I couldn’t use my thumb to play it in the car. But I learned to reach my index finger over to the directional pad and make it work.
That vacation was a bummer as I couldn’t do a lot of the things we had planned on. But the experience taught me a valuable lesson, and that was either “don’t play titty twister at bible school”, or “don’t block a punch with your hand”. I’ll leave it to you the readers to decide which is the moral of this story.
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