The Attack of the Severed Toe

Recently, there's been a lot of controversy about the new movie "Kick Ass."  Roger Ebert calls it "morally reprehensible" because the movie involves an eleven-year-old girl who uses the C word and brutally murders people with hammers.  I myself don't worry too much about impressionable eleven-year-old girls going out and killing people, but then again I exhibited many signs of a future serial killer as a child and I turned out (reasonably) okay.

It was a normal summer morning in 1985 and I was sitting in the old La-Z-Boy in our TV room, eating a slice of Wonder Bread and watching "Pole Position."  Suddenly, there was a piercing scream coming from the backyard.  I froze.  The back door burst open and my dad ran through the house screaming, "I cut my foot off!  I cut my foot off!"  He thumped through the house on his heel, threw open the front door and continued his shock-induced flight across the street, where he was tackled by our neighbor and cousin.  They loaded my dad into their station wagon (forever after known as the Toe Truck) and headed off to the hospital.

My mom came running down the stairs and I told her what was going on.  Immediately we went into the backyard and I watched as she frantically started going through the bag of lawn shavings looking for my dad's amputated body parts.  How's that for a vision just ripe for a future post traumatic stress case?  We couldn't find the toe and she headed off to the hospital.  My dad ended up losing two toes that morning in the rusted bowels of our lawnmower.

A few months later, my parents had hired a friend's kid to mow the lawn and he knocked on the door announcing that he had found my dad's big toe in the bushes.  My mom went out and picked it up with a plastic bag, tied it and threw it in the garbage can in the garage.  It probably never entered her mind that her adorable six-year-old daughter already had the wheels in her brain grinding up a plan for revenge.

We had moved into that house months before, and our block was infested with boys.  I had spent the beginning of my childhood as the beloved princess, surrounded by adults who exclaimed over every drawing I cranked out and had unlimited patience for sitting around and watching my musical performances.  Once we moved, I discovered that boys like to tease and torment girls.  I had no brothers and was not used to this, and because I was a wuss sensitive artistic child, I would cry when teased instead of attacking back. That all changed when the world's greatest weapon was delivered to my life courtesy of the attack lawnmower and my dad's pain.

I fished the bag out of the garbage can.  My dad's toe still had the nail on it.  It was fish-belly white, lacking any color whatsoever.  I turned it around and saw that the inside was completely hollow, probably eaten by bugs.  It was without a doubt the grossest thing I had ever seen, and I knew that it was perfect for my plan.

My friend Anne and I ran across the street where the boys were playing in her yard.  They probably started to taunt us as we walked up, at least that's the way I like to remember it.  I took a deep breath, fished my dad's toe out of the bag and threw it at one of the bullies.  It bounced off him, hit the ground, and the boys gathered around to see what it was.  I'll never forget how their faces twisted with horror as the full realization that they were being attacked by a severed toe hit them.  I scooped it up again and lobbed it against another boy.  Chaos ensued and I am happy to say more than one of them cried.  Our neighbor heard the commotion and came out and put a stop to the battle, but I had more than made my point, and I doubt any of them would ever forget that I was the type of young lady that had no problem attacking others with medical waste.

Now, I think if I were a parent and my sweet, charming little girl pulled this stunt, I'd have her at the best child psychologist in Chicago the very next morning.  My dad gave me a stern lecture about, and this I think reveals his confusion about how to deal with the whole issue, respecting other people's body parts.  Then they sent me to my room.  They probably hid the knives for the next couple of years and watched me carefully around my little sisters and small animals, but that ended up being my only severed limb attack, and so far I have not murdered anyone or burned down any churches, so things turned out fine.

So yeah, maybe this little eleven-year-old brutal murderer with a potty mouth in "Kick Ass" is just going through a murderous stage.  I'm sure her peers will look back and shake their heads and chuckle over her antics, although I am guessing that, like in my case, none of them will ever ask her to babysit.