Edward Scissortoes

Now when we took me and D Boon's and George's stench and put them up on stage,
We'd fight at practice, then jam econo. —“Tour Spiel,” The Minutemen

More planning went into this post than into the invasion of Normandy.

I made my quasi-weekly trek down to Pour Brewhouse, but owing to the weather I had to sit inside, and this is where I place the blame for the 1,800 or so words that I wound up flushing down the drain like so much poorly digested hamburger meat. You’d think that given the wealth of time a week and a half off of work would afford a man, I could have produced, at a minimum, five or six insights worthy of a chin scratch, yet for all that verbiage the best bit was two paragraphs’ worth of musing about how the definition of the second is related to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium 133 atom, which is a joke see because I don’t know what any of those words means. Clever, no?

Anyway, whatever I meant to write has vanished into the ether from whence it came, leaving me on the cusp of Publication Day with my pockets pulled out like that top-hatted Monopoly man when the tax man comes knocking by way of an ill-timed Chance card. What does one do in such times of need? Easy: one breaks off a tiny crumb from one’s moldering supply of stories from one’s dipshit youth.¹

Now, I’d intended to write a bit of something about my German-acquisition efforts, a pursuit into which I have, for reasons known only to God, poured three years of my time. I’m not sure what it was that I thought so very worthy of remark, but I cannot miss an opportunity to brag: I just finished my fourth German novel. Reading, not writing. Proving once more that I cannot dabble in a series but must indeed devour the entire hog—snout, feet, and tail—I will admit that 3/4 of that oeuvre consists of detective novels featuring Kriminalkommissar Gereon Rath of the Berlin homicide unit, set in the late Weimar Republic and early years of the Third Reich. It’s a fascinating ground-level portrait of the breakdown of Germany over those years, and I’m pleased to have arrived at a point where I can read with such fluidity—I can sometimes go an entire page without having to consult a dictionary, and can usually read an entire chapter with only occasional interruptions to hunt down meanings or disentangle grammar. It’s a wonderful skill to possess and fulfills a lifetime goal, though I have no intention of stopping here.

Anyway, in lieu the self-indulgent philosophizing I’d intended, I’d like to simply tell you a story about how German led to me having a square toenail.

How did this happen?!

My first formal encounter with German began in the distant year of 1984. That was the year I started high school, and as soon as I discovered that German was offered, I pounced. I’d always had an affinity for the language, I can only presume because it was the country of my birth, however dimly I might remember it.² The class was taught by Frau Stein³—Dorothy to her husband and to my fellow students whenever we chose to needle her, which was always.

My classmates consisted of a high percentage of very intelligent but completely out-of-control teenagers.⁴ I don’t know if the language draws clever miscreants or what, but the chemistry of that class was a teacher’s nightmare, and Frau Stein was particularly ill-equipped to handle it.

We were, it is true, cruel and inhuman. Little pockets of hooting and maniacal hyperactivity would spring up from one corner of the classroom and rapidly grow until it was like the Detroit riots of 1968. I can’t recall the exact focus of any of these eruptions, but I do remember the day we taped all the classroom supplies to the wall of the weird little cloakroom in back. I have no idea why we did this, but once we got started, continuing became a matter of pride. As Frau Stein traveled the room, focused on helping individual students, we got up, sauntered to her desk, pinched a pencil or a book or whatever, sauntered casually to the back, and taped the item to the wall. We kept it up until her desk was empty.

So yeah, it’s not like she didn’t have a reason to hate us. But here’s the thing: Frau Stein was a humorless weeble-wobble with a schoolbus yellow Q-tip hairdo, and if there was one thing that drove us in our insatiable quest to make her lose her temper, it was the fact that her anger was a useless weapon and incredibly easy to elicit. She was, in her own way, as bad as we were.

To wit: One fateful afternoon I was directed by Frau Stein—probably in the interest of securing a brief period of calm in which to, you know, teach German—she directed me to assist a trio of other students in moving a file cabinet for another teacher.

We trekked over to another building where the cabinet was located on the second floor. This was one of those tall gray metal file cabinets, containing five drawers full of papers. The thing must have weighed 200 pounds, and we—that is myself and three kids I’d never seen before or since, culled from the dregs of other classes presumably—were tasked with getting the cabinet down to the first floor.

Nowadays there’s no way a teacher would assign a job like this to a bunch of 14-year olds. It’s a lawsuit waiting to happen. But this was 1984 and I’m not sure lawyers even existed yet, or if they did they were all busy trying to devise new ways for the Reagan administration to commit crimes without getting in trouble. So we shoved and cajoled and kicked the hulking cabinet down the hallway as though we would live forever, gouging deep scratches in the polished linoleum floors and creating enough racket to disrupt several times the number of classrooms we’d been disrupting earlier in the hour.

When we reached the stairs our teenaged problem-solving abilities kicked in, and we simply shoved the cabinet off the top step and watched as it bumped down to the landing with the noise of a dumptruck rolling sideways down a rocky incline. It seemed to have survived the journey so we prepared to impel it down the second staircase.

This time the cabinet thudded down the stairs as before but stopped short of the first floor hallway. We walked down after it. It was lying on the floor but for one corner still perched on the last step. I stood next to it, observing its angle as though I were preparing an elaborate mechanism involving block and tackle to hoist it the rest of the way down, but one of the other kids, a take-charge type but lacking in anything approaching awareness of other humans, simply stomped down the stairs, put his foot against the elevated corner, and pushed.

Without warning, the ponderous cabinet slipped off the step and slammed down hard on the big toe of my right foot.

A bolt of pain shot from my toe directly to my brain, and a flurry of cursing emerged from my mouth. The other kids took no notice and simply went on their way, scooting the cabinet destructively down the hall. I removed my shoe to find my sock already soaked and dripping with blood. The pain was exquisite.

Not knowing what else to do I began to hop back to my classroom. This took a considerable period of time, during which at least two teachers observed my passage with the same detachment one might expect from a wildebeast cautiously celebrating the fact they weren’t the ones brought down by the lions at the watering hole that day. After an interminable period—it was probably the farthest I’ve ever hopped—I arrived back at Frau Stein’s classroom. I hopped through the door and through the ranks of my fellow students until I reached her desk, where she sat with a scowl, clearly annoyed by my one-footed up-and-down antics.

“The cabinet fell on my foot,” I said to her.

And her response, hand to God, was this: “Probably serves you right.”

The toe was not broken fortunately. I lost the nail, but I was able to walk again in a few days. As the nail grew back in however, it curled along the edges and dug into the toe. It became infected. My mom took me to a surgeon that cut the nail and the cuticle along its outer edges, leaving it narrower than the corresponding nail on the other foot—only the relatively flat middle area remains. The result, still, almost forty years on, is an almost perfectly square nail with razor sharp corners. My wife refers to me using the title of this piece.

I don’t know if Frau Stein would be proud to know that I have achieved such a high level of fluency in her subject. I’d happily write her off as that twit that hated kids and probably set me back in the ultimate achievement of my aim, but to be perfectly fair, I learned quite a lot of German in those two years in spite of what a catastrophe her class was. My high school German carried my wife and I through Germany and Austria on our honeymoon, at least a portion of which was spent in places where English was not readily available. In fact, some of my most cherished memories were facilitated by that rudimentary German. We spent three days with the family that had hosted my parents when I was born, and in spite of my limited vocabulary and grammar, we had several warm conversations. I cracked up the whole bunch doing an impression of JFK announcing that he was a jelly donut.

So thanks to Frau Stein. The toe doesn’t hurt anymore, and I guess if I’m asked why I pursue the tongue now in spite of the lack of any practical application, I’d have to say the sacrifice has already been made; I may as well collect.

Guten Rutsch ins neue Jahr, folks. May 2025 be a year in which our collective fortunes return to mean. We have sacrificed for it for decades.

1. And I still managed to miss my self-imposed and completely meaningless deadline of 11am, owing to a migraine.

2. I don’t remember a single thing about it.

3. The names have been changed because, well, you know.

4. One would go on to be one of my dearest friends to this day, despite the fact I contact him about once every three years. Sorry, Aaron. If you’re reading this, hey.