One of my friends, who was a couple of years older than me, Bill, found a job managing a large farm. The job came with a little old house, on the side of a hill, where many of my friends would gather when they were in the area. It is in an area just west of Nashville that is very hilly, Kingston Springs, and it was a wonderful place to explore. On one wooded hill top there were stones set vertically in the ground, like headstones. Some looked like someone had tried and failed to chip some words or symbols on them sometime in the past. We called this farm Bill's Farm.
While I was decomposing in Indiana, the object of my obsession, came up to Bloomington to keep me company. Fuck school, I couldn't handle the stress. We decided, instead, to head for Bill's farm. Three other people and a baby had already moved in with him. Two were brothers; one was helping Bill with farm duties, the other one saw himself as an aspiring musician and song writer and let his wife wait tables to help pay bills. I assumed I would join her in waiting tables to help pay for my lodging there.
The guy I came with was to become husband #1, later. He was a vegetarian and informed me that, hands that served meat, and a mouth that ate it, would not be touching him. Without even a blip on my idiot screen, I dismissed the waitressing plan and became a vegetarian mooch like him. He was from a family that was wealthy, by local standards, and was spoiled rotten (his words) and proud of it. I soon learned that wealthy parents do not make a wealthy son. (Our son is finding that out in a most painful way, now that his father is reputed to be worth $mucho via inheritance. I have no way of, or desire to confirm or refute this information. But I've jumped ahead in the story.)
The house was not modern enough to have any source of heat other than a wood stove or plug-in heaters. I'll call hus#1 J.P.. He was a guitarist. He and the other male musician would not do manual labor because it might mess-up their "picking nails".
So, that left Bill and the other brother to chop the wood, etc. (I was just as useless and also deserve your scorn). Bill, I owe you some money and an apology!
Some time that winter J.P. and I ended up in M'boro at the college one night and I was using their intaglio printing press, to make prints from a copper plate engraving that I had done during semester #1 at a College in Memphis. This was an electric press. I had always used a hand run press. The batts, over the plate and paper, were wrinkling. I began to smooth them out, when the press roller grabbed onto the fingers on my left hand. In that split second, I didn't think of turning off the press or hitting reverse. All I could see in my imagination, was my hand, arm, and the rest of me being flattened as it all went under the rollers, like in a cartoon, so I yelped and yanked as hard as I could, leaving the tips of two of my fingers in the machine. I now know that you should take those to the hospital with you, but we didn't know that then. God, I feel sorry for the person that found them. It was flesh and finger nails, no bones were lost.
So I ended up in a bedroom at J.P.'s parent's house, in some of the worst pain of my life. What ever I had been given for pain killers were useless. A day or two later the doctor saw me again and gave me a prescription for new pain killers, and a shot of thorazine to give me a break from my suffering. We headed to the pharmacy and while they were filling the prescription, the Thorazine started to take affect. I remember trying to slide onto the bottom shelf on an aisle nearby, so I wouldn't be on the floor when I lost consciousness. I could hear an employee saying, "What's she on?" Then I was in the car. Then I was in bed sleeping. Thank God, no more pain! At least for a while.
I don't remember if I was there for a few days or a couple of weeks. I do remember that, after a while, the doctor wanted me to soak the bandaged fingers in hydrogen peroxide for a couple of days, to loosen the dried blood, so he could get the bandages off. When I got to his office, the bandages still refused to leave my wounds, so he just yanked them off! Then, without any anesthetic, he proceeded to cut off chunks of ragged flesh from around the stitches. I felt like I might pass out as the room began to swirl.
I was too young and polite to tell him he was a Sadistic Asshole.
My brother drove me to our parent's house in Indiana to recover and for the holidays.
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