I’ll never forget the first time I met Mary Jane. She was at a party I had gone to sometime during my Senior year in high school. She was a scary one, for sure. I had heard all sorts of troubling things about her from fellow students as well as some adults that I had great respect for. If so many people thought that of her, they must be right, right? She showed no interest in me and I none in her. Funny how life is! I didn’t realize just how big a part she would play in my life.
Years went by and I ended up in college studying art education. One Friday evening I was invited to a party downstairs in somebody’s dorm room. I hadn’t met too many people yet, so it was an excellent time to make some more acquaintances. As I walked into the room there was something familiar, it was Mary Jane! I recognized her from across the room. She hadn’t changed much and in fact as I approached her I noticed she was wearing the same fragrance she had the night we first met. She didn’t seem as scary as she one had, maybe because I had matured into a young adult and was able to now form my own opinions or maybe it was that she just seemed different to me, but the thought of being with her just didn’t feel the same as it one had. We seemed to hit it off that night and I soon found myself wanting to see her on a regular basis. As the months went by we didn’t get to see each other as much as I had hoped and inevitably we lost track of each other once again.
My college years were not very consistent for me and I became bored with college life and decided to drop out and go to work with my parents in their interior decorating business. I ended up being a well paid gopher for my mom and dad, learning the ins and outs of the business. In the summer of 1973, while visiting some acquaintances at their campground in Oak Creek Canyon, who do you think happened to show up? It was Mary Jane. As I sat there, I wondered why, after all this time, she had shown up again, but there she was staring at me from across the campfire. I wanted to share some memories with one her, but I had to be at work in the morning so I excused myself from the reunion and headed down the canyon road towards town.
I hadn’t been on the road very long when out of the blue a passenger bus came at me in my lane. Did I mention that this particular road wound along the side of the creek and in places, like where I encountered the bus, it was cut out of the side of the mountain? I put my Ranchero into a panic skid and hit the bus at 50 miles an hour. The bus was also traveling at 50 miles per hour so the impact was that of a 100 miles per hour crash. The bus ended up over the embankment and I ended up pinned under the dash of my car facing the opposite direction I had been traveling. I don’t remember any of this and was in and out of consciousness for nearly 3 weeks. The first person to come upon the wreck thought I had lost control and hit the guard rail until they realized that over the edge of the road there was a bus. Lucky for me the person who stopped was a nurse and she immediately began to work on my injuries. There weren’t cell phones in 1973 so someone had to call for help which meant I was going to be there a while. It took 2 ½ hours to get me out of my car and it would have taken longer if the tow truck driver wasn’t an acquaintance of mine and figured out how to wench the steering column off of me instead of waiting for the jaws of life to arrive. After I was out of the vehicle a decision had to be made by the ambulance driver about which hospital I should be taken to. A life saving decision was made to send me up the switchbacks and on to Flagstaff because they were better equipped to handle trauma like I had absorbed. All the decisions made that night saved my life.
The extent of my injuries were extensive including a compound fracture of my femur, a fractured left knee cap, a right knee cap that was nearly torn off, a broken right ankle, severe lacerations to my face and head, and a left hand that had gone through the windshield. All of these injuries and I got the best surgeon in Flagstaff on call that night. I am so lucky! Dr. John did the work stitching my face and torn off ear back together with such precision and care that I never had to have plastic surgery of any kind. After patching up my face, he proceeded on to that torn up right knee. Again he put it back together with such precision that I never needed to have any work done to it afterwards. When it came to the leg injuries a decision was made to immobilize the broken ankle with a cast until I was stable enough to have surgery to pin it together. The compound fracture of my left femur was treated by putting my leg in traction to get the bones aligned so it could be put in a cast. The leg was supported by a sling-like device. There was a pin protruding both sides of my tibia with a tong-like device attached to both sides, a rope attached to it going over a pulley at the end of my bed, and a weight on the end. I was in this contraption for 10 weeks.
Although I was in and out of consciousness for three weeks, I finally became aware that something was not right. I asked where I was and was told the hospital. Then I asked why and was told I had been in an accident. The next words out of my mouth were,”How did the airplane get involved?” I thought I had been hit by an airplane! I guess all that aluminum and the height of the headlights on the bus looked to me like the landing lights of an airplane right before I was hit.
I was in intensive care for those first three weeks and then in a semi-private room until they felt good enough about the alignment of the femur that they could put me in a body cast. Once, about 7 weeks into this ordeal, they thought it was good enough to pull the pin out of my tibia and put me in my cast. They were wrong about the alignment and ended up putting me back into traction again. The thing that really sucked about this was watching them put in the new pin. That was a very weird sensation watching them use a hand drill and a piece of 10 gauge stainless to re-insert the pin into my tibia. The most intriguing thing was when the wire had gone all the way through the tibia and was trying to poke through the other side of my leg. A small slit was made with a scalpel where the tip was and the doctor continued to drill until the wire protruded enough on both sides to re-attach the tong-like device one again.
Three weeks later I was again taken out of traction and put in a body cast that went from just under my rib cage all the way down my left leg and half way down my right leg just short of my right knee. A pole was put between my legs holding them apart at just less than 30 degrees and a cut-out was put on the cast so that I could take care of my bodily functions. Did I mention that all this time in traction, 10 weeks, and in my body cast, 14 weeks, I had to pee in a bottle and go in a bed pan? That was really embarrassing for me at 23 years of age. It was also very depressing. I was taken home while still in my body cast and spent those three and a half months in a hospital bed in the middle of my family’s living room so that I could be near the phone, TV, and kitchen. Since both of my parents were involved in their business I was taken care of during the day by my dear 80 year old grandmother who was living with us at the time. I had a lot of visitors while I was in the hospital, but it wasn’t long before that slacked off. A respiratory therapist I had befriended at the hospital offered to take care of me.
She arrived, met my parents and they were off to where-ever, I think Las Vegas. She hadn’t been there an hour when her friend and she took off to do some shopping at some of the local tourist traps. While she and her friend were gone, one of my college acquaintances, Bob came cruising up from Phoenix and stopped to find me in the hospital bed in the living room. He wasn’t aware of my accident, so he was quite surprised to find me by myself. I am sure Grandma was there, but being in her eighties, she wasn’t able to do all the things I needed like food, bedpan, etc. Bob asked where my parents were and I told him of the girl and her friend who were there to help me while Mom and Dad were out of town. One hour passed, two, three, after they had been gone that long they finally came bopping in the door. Bob spoke to the girl almost immediately when she came in and told her she could go on home, he had it handled. Remember I said he was an acquaintance, not even what I would consider a friend at the time. He was soon to be one of my best friends throughout college. He took care of me until Mom and Dad returned and did everything for me I would have had trouble doing for anyone other than my family. Bob has a huge urge to give of himself and really surprised me that he would do all that for me. He was in construction at the time and was out of work so my dad put him to work helping him. (My job)
As time passed I couldn’t wait to get out of the cast and was happy for the day I went back up the hill in the back of the family station wagon. The happiness would soon pass. After I was taken out of the cast and they tried to lift my leg out, the thigh folded in the middle. After 6 months the leg was still broken! The month is December, the thirty mile drive up the canyon can be very treacherous in the summer, and it was winter with ice and snow. My poor parents! I ended having to be in the hospital for Christmas and New Years. To put my leg together they had to stair-step it, removing a piece of bone floating around in the middle of the break. To stimulate bone growth, a bone graph was taken from my hip and put into the leg. Two stainless steel erector set looking plates and 12 screws are holding my femur together. What they forgot to tell me before the operation was that my femur would be 2 inches shorter. When I became more conscious after the operation it wasn’t long before I noticed one of my feet looked closer than the other. I was on the call button immediately and the nurse said she would contact the surgeon. He came in later that day and re-assured me it was all they could do.
After leaving the hospital in a wheel chair, I spent the next two months waiting for the bones to mend. They didn’t want to risk the chance of me falling and breaking the leg again. After another two and one half months I was allowed to walk with crutches. It was then that I decided to leave the nest once and for all. I hitched a ride to Flagstaff and went in to see my old counselor at the college. He helped set me up with room and tuition as well as he got me in touch with a Social Security officer that could help me get back into school with the money I would need for food and books. When the summer session started I had my room and since I had no car to get back and forth I knuckled down to finish with just under a 3.0 average. I was ready to take on the world!
To my surprise, Bob enrolled in engineering school and roomed with a guy that would become our other wing-man, Frank. We three were like the “Three Amigos”. We did a lot of interesting things together and I am surprised that we managed to stay away from the law. We all got our degrees at different times, but managed to stay in touch after college. In the future, Frank would lose his job with a well known company because of Mary Jane showing up while he was taking his random drug screening. He finally recovered financially, but it took years. All of it happened because of some archaic law that should have been overturned long ago. Things like that make it easier to see the injustice of the punishment…lost his job because of Mary Jane? He was a geologist and had found millions of dollars worth of gold, silver, and uranium for that company and that is how they rewarded him for what he did on “his time”. Bob ended up with a degree in engineering and was hired immediately, got married, had a boy to carry on the family name. I graduated and was substitute teaching waiting for a teaching position to open up. In the meantime, my parents ended their 27 year marriage and my mom asked me if I would step in and do Dad’s job. After a very short time I was selling, measuring, installing blinds and draperies as well as flooring.
It was the year 1976. Great rock and roll, decent herb, and I was in my little bachelor pad enjoying it all. It had been quite a while since I had seen Mary Jane, but after getting settled in I learned who I could and couldn’t be open with. Up to that time I hadn’t even tried to contact her, so seeing so much of her in a short time made me very nervous. I’ll just say it was more than that she had put on some weight. A friend convinced me he could get a date for her if he could get up to Durango. It worked well and we did it a couple more times with our buddy in Colorado. Mary Jane in those days was a rather skinny, stick like bundle of joy, but she was a cheap date. It was then it hit me, co-op! Mary Jane seemed to want to date lots of us at the same time and was willing to change her appearance to suit us. Sometimes she would dress up as a Mexican, Colombian, California wine grower, an Arizona cowboy, or a Hawaiian. She was so versatile, or so we thought in those days. Little did we know at the time she would get better with age. The girl had become a woman!
Fast forward to 2015. So much has happened, lost both my parents, Dad at sixty-one, Mom at eighty-three. My dad would have had a fit if he had been aware of my affair with Mary Jane. Mom knew and didn't approve but was never able to confront anyone, including me. I have had several jobs, design consultant and part owner in a business, high school teacher, security guard, parts counter and phone salesman, and substitute teacher. Obviously I had to keep my affair with Mary Jane secret and again only my closest friends knew. I had dreamed of the day when long before now the negativeness about my affair with her would go away, not so much for my sake, but for those who had not yet met her. Her wonderful perfume, her giddiness, and her more than medicinal nature made her hard to forget. Although she still is fighting for an equal playing field, she is starting to win everyone over. I am hoping that in the near future others will cherish my sweet Mary Jane as much as I have.
