Head Wound - A Childhood Memory

To this very day, I will never understand how it was Michael --who was 11 and living next door to me -- came home with a knife sticking out of his forehead. It was beyond surreal because it was real.

We were all outside. At about 2:00 pm, Michael walked up to his brother (my best friend) and I who were bursting tar bubbles in the street in New Bedford Massachusetts. We were both 8.

We heard him before we saw him.
"Rain's coming" he said as he turned. Then we turned and looked up at the cloudless, burning August afternoon sky.
My best friend and I looked at his brother Michael and our eyes must have widened simultaneously. Undoubtedly, our mouths did the same.

Michael had a kitchen knife stuck out of his forehead.
It was placed vertically, from just above the tip of his nose about 3/4 of the way to his scalp line. It was in deep and blood trickled down the side of the knife and his face.

"Cool huh" Michael said as he stopped a minute so we could get the full effect of knife inserted right into skull just about to the handle.

Then Michael walked past us; down the small driveway and took a right; climbed three porch steps and opened a silver door trimmed with yellow curtains that led to the kitchen where his mother and father were cooling off inside with the fan.

I heard the mom's shriek the same time I hear the kitchen door slam.
I heard the father's angry voice, though not his words -- because the voice was lowered, measured. Dad's was the angry (and overdone) Christian Bale Batman voice.

I looked in my best friend's eyes and his met mine and no words were either available and/or necessary. We were frozen in our spots on the curb surrounded by a black oozing sea of popped tar bubbles and only turned our heads when the back door opened and the people exited -- mom, dad and son with knife in head.

"Mind the house, we're headed to the hospital darling" mom shouted to us from the front seat as they backed the car out behind us. She looked just like June Cleaver.

As they backed up, we looked directly at Michael as he stared right at us, seated in the back seat in the window behind his mother up front. The knife was still in place in his head and wrapped with a towel that was turning from white to red before our eyes.

The oddest site of all though was Michael's smile. He just smiled at us broadly, in pure pleasure, not pain... and gave us a wink as his folks drove my best friend's little brother to the hospital.

The hospital kept Michael.... not just because he put the knife in his own head while his best friend's mother was cutting salami for lunch...
then insisted on walking home with said knife in said head.

The hospital kept Michael because the week before the knife episode, Michael put the family's tiny little dachsund in the oven to "make a hot dog for lunch," he said. I walked in while the dog was being cooked. Suffice to say it was not pretty or forgettable.

I knew then that my next door neighbor who happened to be my best friend's brother was a psycho.

But I was 8 years old and not sure what do with that information short of tell my parents. Which is what I did.
The animal truck and a police car were at the house the next day.
They took the dead dog with them and left Michael.
I remember thinking, "It should be the other way around."

Michael was committed to what we called the state nut house the day after the knife in head episode. I never saw Michael again. The family moved to another state a month later. I never saw my best friend again either.

So..I looked up my best friend, a few months ago, on the net.
He was dead.
Michael the psycho brother was not.
Again I thought, "It should have been the other way around."