Every show on tour has its ups and downs. This one resulted in stitches!
This story is not for the squeamish, so you might want to move along if you are!
This date I had to fly into Chicago from Orlando and take a cab from the airport. The gig was at some pub style bar in mid January 1990. On the cab ride in, I noticed the driver’s name badge and asked him if he was Russian. He got pretty defensive and I’m thinking oh crap, I better shut up before I end up in some warehouse tied to a chair!
We finally arrived at the venue, THE LONG WAY, and the bus was ready to load in and waiting on me. I made a quick phone call to some friends in Chicago, who would be meeting me later at the show, then got all bundled up and climbed into the “trunk” under the bus to shove out all the gear, we needed to set up inside. Some local guys from the club were assigned to help me.
I’m not 5 minutes into dragging it all out, when the local guy lost his grip on the bass cabinet and the whole thing landed on my hand. I saw it coming and tried to pull back, but it caught the tips of my fingers.
F*ckity, F$ck, F@ck! I knew it was bad, because it felt warm and wet all of the sudden inside my glove. I did not want to even look!! First, I had to get out of the hole I was in, swear at the guy who dropped it on me, cry a little, swear some more, jump around outside, then head inside from the blizzard, to see how bad it was. As soon as I got inside, I grabbed Rich, the tour manager and asked him to come into the bathroom with me, I just smashed my hand. We got in there and I reluctantly pulled off my glove…
I smashed my finger so hard, it popped and fat was coming out the end like a squashed grape! There wasn’t too much blood, because it was split open and the fat was holding the blood in. It looked like cottage cheese with pepper on it, coming out the end of my finger. It was pretty gross, but kind of amusing at the same time. Neither of us had seen anything like it!
So off to the ER for X-rays and stitches. It wasn’t broken, but someone had to shove the fat back in and stitch it up! This is where I learned that a mouth full of dental work had made me immune to Novocain. They shot an entire vile of it into my finger and it only made my already swollen finger, now full of fluid. Well, obviously that wasn’t going to work, what else you got? The doc admitted he was fresh out of medical school and started digging around for some zylocain (spelling?) which thankfully worked.
Rich sat there and watched him stitch up the whole thing. Yuk, I just sat there trying not to look. He wrapped a giant bandage on it and told me to keep it elevated. Oh, did I forget to mention?… it was my right middle finger! Yep, FU Chicago!!!
We arrived back at the club shortly before show time, the stage was all set up and ready to go, including my guitar world. Yay! My friends had arrived and were quite amused by my Statue of Liberty FTW pose. No night off for me, it was back to business, worked the show and had enough shots lined up for me to kill the pain!
They told me to go get my stitches taken out in about a week. 10 days later Erik Cartwright dug them out with a knife in Lake Tahoe. I still have the scar and forever altered finger print to prove it!
Psycho Seamstress 