“Hey, Pork Chop,” Swiney said one day. “Watch this.”
Cookie Monster and Demon were out collecting trash about five hundred feet from the Ford pickup truck that was their mobile command center for a dozen hours a day. We all drove trucks specially fitted with two gas tanks, and we had to monitor the fuel levels constantly; the last thing you wanted was to run out of gas somewhere out in the cold, miles from the camp. You had to leave the engine running at all times because if you turned the truck off in the bad weather, it might not start up again. The young women wore beekeepers’ helmets too (once they saw mine, they each wanted one, and they paid me ten times more than it cost me to purchase the materials for them), but they had an aversion to carrying the nine-pound air-monitoring devices that would alert them to the presence of hydrogen sulfide gas—known as H2S around those parts—a lethal byproduct of the drilling that sometimes seeped to the surface of the fields. Swiney, the team leader, had been on their cases about it, but they said it weighed them down too much while they worked. They’d been told repeatedly that at a certain threshold of parts per million, H2S can shut down human hearts and lungs. Even that information didn’t convince them to lug around the monitors.
So that day, Swiney took his own air-monitoring device, put it down by his butt, and farted loudly into the equipment, which immediately set off the machine’s warning signals and sent the huge caribou herd galloping. The monitor’s alarm and the thundering hooves of thousands of animals were the only sounds in that barren, apocalyptic landscape of scrub and mud.
“H-two-S! H-two-S!” he screamed. The girls dropped the wooden spears that gave us our job description—stick-pickers—and ran for their lives, bumping into each other and repeatedly falling in the mud as they plowed toward the truck to get their gas masks. Swiney and I ran for cover, doubling over with laughter.
Later, a truck full of oil workers came speeding toward our crew. By now, we were used to the crass and randy men who made up the village of five thousand employees. They hung out the window of the truck and whistled and made rude gestures at the women and then threw an open bag of garbage at our feet.
“Job security!” screamed one of the men as they sped away. The oil workers faced serious danger every day, and they resented the fact that we did much safer work but earned nearly as much as they did, and all because each of us had a dad or an uncle or a family friend who was an industry executive and who threw a little nepotism our way. Stick-pickers like us seldom reported the abuse; we knew life would be even worse in that frontier town if we did. We simply leaned over, picked up the trash, and got back to work.
I had a girlfriend named Melissa at the time; she worked on a different crew, and we broke camp rules and trysted together in our off-hours in the barracks where we lived for the season. We hung thick blankets over the windows to block out the midnight sun. Melissa was very pretty and very smart, but we were young and the last thing I wanted was to get too serious.
One day it was particularly cold out on the tundra and I knew Melissa’s parka wouldn’t be warm enough for her shift, so I lent her my warmest, thickest coat. Both of our crews were sent to clean the field around the landing strip, where a cargo plane had just set down. My group was alongside the plane, parallel to it; Melissa, sitting in her crew’s pickup truck, was directly behind the jet. Out of the blue, only minutes after the plane’s engine had shut down, it started back up. I turned immediately to Melissa’s crew and started jumping and waving for them to get out of the way, but it was too late. I saw the young Eskimo man she worked with go hurtling through the air in the jet wash. I began to run toward them, avoiding the exhaust stream.
When I got to the truck, Melissa was inside and all the windows on the vehicle were blown out. The jacket I’d lent her was pierced everywhere by shards of glass, but the lining was so thick that the glass hadn’t cut all the way through, and she’d been wearing her helmet the whole time. I was so relieved she was all right, and I realized how much I really did care for her. Her coworker had only minor injuries, but he could easily have been killed. It was always scary in the oil fields, and always dangerous, but although I hate to admit it, it was also thrilling, all of it.
Somehow we all managed to survive that work assignment and we made it back home to civilization.
When I was in Anchorage, my friend Rick Cordova was my go-to pal for good times. Tall, dark, and handsome, he was popular with the ladies and was always upsetting one jealous boyfriend or another. Sometimes it was just because he showed up to a bar looking really good. He hadn’t done anything at all—yet. Once we were walking in the mall and some guy with a beef started to run toward him, his arm pulled back to deliver a punch. I yelled, “Duck!” Rick hit the deck, and the guy missed. We were a good team.
When I married Melissa, Rick traveled all the way to our wedding in Montana. Despite Melissa and I not wanting to get too serious, she’d gotten pregnant back in Alaska. One day, right after we found out, I ran into her uncle. He was an oil executive who worked up on the slope. “I know you’ll do the right thing,” he said sternly. So I did. I proposed.
I’d been incredibly nervous and uncertain about marriage and family at first, but a couple of months before the baby was due, I started to become excited—I wanted to be a father. This made it especially devastating when Jason Padgett Jr. was born premature and lived only a couple of days. He died in my arms as I rocked him back and forth in a chair in a corner of the hospital room. Melissa and I just stood there like zombies during the funeral. He was the only thing that had kept us together, but neither of us realized how much we had wanted him until tragedy struck. Melissa and I clung to each other for another year, then we divorced. I think of her often and of the little boy who bore my name.
If Jason Jr. had lived, I might have settled down and become a real family man. Who knows? Fate had dealt me a different hand and I went right on back to my partying ways. It was just who I was. That’s not to say I never had a quiet moment of introspection or that I was totally shallow in those years. There were times in my early life when I took responsibility for myself, and for others too. Still, the majority of my younger years are a blur. I was spinning like a top in pursuit of stimulation. I had to find excitement outside my own mind, as I had very little inner life, and the inner life I did have wasn’t anything I wanted to dwell on. As I mentioned, my parents each went through a string of divorces and remarriages, and my brother, John, became increasingly troubled and estranged from the rest of us as he grew older.
Despite my outward happy-go-lucky, party-guy persona, there was an undercurrent of seediness in the club life I lived, from the drama of the promiscuity to the violence of the alcohol-fueled fights. Behavior that was cute or at least expected when I was in my twenties—boys will be boys, after all—became a little sad when I was in my thirties, as I kept to the same habits while most everyone else was settling down.
By that point I’d had another child, a beautiful daughter named Megan, with one of my girlfriends, Michelle. I was overjoyed when she was born healthy, and I loved her completely, but marrying her mother wasn’t something that appealed to me, and it didn’t appeal to Michelle either. For a while, we rented on the same floor in the same apartment building so that Megan could just run between our homes and have us both near. But having a daughter didn’t change my partying ways. As long as I kept moving, kept drinking, kept hooking up and laughing, I didn’t have to face anything inside that might be troubling me.
I’d fallen short of everyone’s early expectations for my future. I’d scored very high on an IQ test administered in elementary school, and my father swore from that day forward that I was a genius, but subsequent tests I took online were not as promising, and I gave up on my mind and its potential and just lived for the thrills of adrenaline rushes and good parties. In the battle between mind and body, my physicality had won. In my early twenties, I’d decided I would run my father’s furniture stores by day and party every night. I thought I wou
ld go on that way forever.
Chapter Three
Subtraction
AT AGE THIRTY-ONE, I guess I was pretty aimless, but it didn’t feel like that to me at the time. I was having fun, bouncing from one night out to the next. I rarely had a serious thought in my head. My only goal was to live with joyful abandon 24-7. And in all honesty, I was really happy.
When my friend Angela called from a karaoke bar on a September night in 2002, I was especially excited to join the party. I knew at least twenty karaoke selections by heart; I didn’t even have to look at the subtitles on the prompter. My top two songs were “Close My Eyes Forever,” by Ozzy Osbourne and Lita Ford, and “Takin’ Care of Business,” by Bachman-Turner Overdrive. I was a good singer, and I loved the reaction I got from the crowds when I took the stage. Sometimes they really, truly cheered for me. I tried not to let this go to my head when I performed, but I used to squint and imagine I was in a stadium filled with a hundred thousand people. So I was looking forward to another karaoke night with friends.
But first I had to get ready.
I put my Charlie Daniels Band CD in my stereo and began bopping around the house playing air fiddle to “The Devil Went Down to Georgia.” I always did a warm-up before going out, to get the adrenaline flowing. I knew the words to this song by heart, but that night I came up with new lyrics based on the line in the original hit song where the hero, Johnny, tells the devil, “Come on back if you ever want to try again.” I guess I was always one to tempt fate. It was a thrilling scenario: a rematch with the Prince of Darkness.
I sang:
It had been several years since these two had first met
And unbeknownst to Johnny, the contest wasn’t over yet . . .
When the devil spotted Johnny basking in the sun
Enjoying all that wealth from the golden fiddle he had won . . .
The devil said to Johnny, “This time I’ll let you start the show,”
But it took Johnny twenty minutes to find his fiddle and his bow.
What if the devil found Johnny years later, bloated and lazy after having won the golden fiddle in the first competition, and challenged him to try again? What if Johnny was foolish enough to gamble his soul one more time? Still dancing, I grabbed a pen and paper, and in the lyrics I found flowing out of me, the devil jumped up on the trunk of Johnny’s new Mercedes-Benz and proceeded to annihilate him in competitive fiddling. Johnny lost the challenge, and his children looked on in horror as he fell to the ground and the devil collected his soul in a leather pouch. This was a really good sequel, I decided.
I sang my new version of the song in the shower, and then I began the business of fixing my hair. My hair was long—okay, it was an actual mullet—and I needed a special brush and plenty of mousse and gel and just the right flick of the wrist while blow-drying to get my bangs the way I wanted them. It was brisk weather outside so I piled on the hairspray and dressed in a long-sleeved shirt and my black leather jacket.
It was Friday the thirteenth, but I wasn’t superstitious. The bar was in a sketchy part of town, but I’d never had a problem before and I wasn’t one to pass up a night out. I made my way upstairs to the second floor of the Mexican restaurant where the bar was located, turned left, and found Angela and her date sitting near the stage. The lighting was dim except for some Christmas-tree lights, a standard bar trick to make everyone look more attractive. How many times had I stayed at a bar until closing and then discovered, when the bright lights were turned on, that the young woman I’d been kissing wasn’t nearly as cute as I’d thought? And perhaps under fluorescent lights, I wasn’t her ideal man either.
There wasn’t much of a crowd, and the place wasn’t exactly rocking like a lot of other bars I went to. For me, a good bar was a spot where people were packed in like sardines, the music was so loud you could feel it thumping in your chest, and eight or nine bouncers had to pull guys off one another a few times a night. That kind of place wasn’t always safe, but I loved the energy—I loved rough-and-tumble good times. There were no bouncers at the karaoke bar that night, and even if there had been, they wouldn’t have had anything to do. It was that quiet.
I made my way to Angela’s table, and people handed the DJ, a cross-dressing man named Cat with long fingernails and eye makeup, slips of paper with their song choices. I knew the song I wanted to do; in fact, I even knew its number in the catalog: 34-A-7. I didn’t even have to look it up. First up was a newly divorced man who sang Jerry Reed’s “She Got the Goldmine (I Got the Shaft).” We all clapped along with him and cheered as he screamed out the bitter lyrics. He definitely felt better by the end of the performance. Angela got her chance a few songs after that and did a perfect “Whatever Lola Wants” from Damn Yankees, which was her signature song, and a little while later, I stood at the microphone serenading the crowd of about thirty people with a Jon Bon Jovi song.
Shot down in a blaze of glory
Take me now, but know the truth.
I used the stage well, walking back and forth with a cowboy gait, and when the tune ended, I took a bow to enthusiastic applause. A couple of people shook my hand and declared it awesome. That made me happy. I was lucky enough to get good reactions after most of my performances. The only time I was ever heckled was when I attempted “The Humpty Dance,” by Digital Underground, and people started yelling, “White boy!”
I walked to the bar and ordered a Coke, and the tall, brunette bartender’s eyes lingered a second too long on my full wallet, but it didn’t quite register. I was carrying only a couple hundred dollars, but I had it in small bills so it must have seemed like a real bankroll. I tipped her two dollars and she smiled, then I downed the soda and motioned for my friends to start packing up so I could give them a ride home. They were a little drunk, and half the reason Angela had called me was so that I could play the designated driver, something we often did for each other. My parents had worked hard to teach me about the dangers of drinking and driving. One night I walked eleven miles home in several feet of Alaska snow rather than take the wheel.
Angela and her date and I made our way down the stairs, followed by two other patrons whom I’d seen sitting in the corner of the bar with their backs to the wall.
I was just ten steps out the front door when a blow struck my head just behind my right ear. There was a flash of white light and I heard a deep low sound, lower than the lowest key on a piano. I went down on one knee and lost consciousness briefly as the blinding white light went to black. When I came to, shortly after that, I was still on one knee and I thought someone had tried to put me in a playful headlock and missed. My male friends were always play-wrestling and roughhousing, and though I hadn’t expected it of Angela’s date, he was probably just trying to be friendly.
Just as I stood to ask Angela and her friend what had happened, there was a second punch to my head from another direction, then a third. I was knocked from side to side and I lost my footing each time, but now I could see Angela and her date in front of me and I knew it wasn’t him. Were my friends really just standing there while this happened? “Goddamn it, help!” I shouted. They stood motionless and I noticed that Angela’s mouth was shaped in a perfect O and she had this wild, horrified look in her eyes. Her date simply threw his hands in the air, turned, and walked away. I fell to the ground. While I lay prone on the sidewalk, the attackers rifled through the pockets of my leather jacket. I saw Angela run inside the restaurant—I hoped she was looking for someone to come help. I managed to grab one of the men by the crotch and squeeze with all my might, then I bit him on the thigh. If I was going to die, someone was going to have a scar to remember me by. A different guy then kicked me in the back of the head in retaliation and shouted an antigay epithet. Punches rained down on me from all directions. It felt like my head was on fire. I didn’t know how many men were attacking me, as I couldn’t get far enough away to gain perspective. I thought it might be a gang.
In the chaos of the mugging, they never once looked
in my back jeans pocket, where I’d put my wallet with the two hundred dollars tucked inside. Frustrated, they settled for the jacket, ripping it off my body and then running down the street. I caught a glimpse of them and knew it was the same two men who’d been in the bar with us. I’d felt no fear while they followed us down the stairs—they towered over me, but they’d looked so clean-cut and strait-laced.
I struggled to my feet. Not only was I in a lot of pain, but I was having trouble getting my bearings. The world looked different: off kilter, dreamlike. Everything that moved had trails of colored light following close behind it. There were triangles and squares in repeating patterns wherever I looked, from the windows to the lampposts to the street signs. Angela came back outside, and though she’d been frozen in place during the attack, now she moved toward me in bizarre, stop-action frames. I rubbed my eyes. The glow of the streetlights seemed amplified. I could see the cars going by, little chipped shapes bouncing off their hoods.
I stumbled into the restaurant and managed to shout, “Call 911!” while I attempted to catch my breath.
“If you want to call 911 you’ll have to go somewhere else,” said one of the waitresses. Angela was by my side and as frustrated and shocked as I was. Neither of us had a cell phone.
Could this be real? I felt like it was a nightmare. I told the waitress that I’d just been attacked by two of their patrons and that they needed to preserve their plates and silverware and glasses for fingerprints. She told me to leave. I asked for the slips of paper from the karaoke registry that might have their names on it. She pointed to the garbage cans.
Struck by Genius: How a Brain Injury Made Me a Mathematical Marvel Page 3
