Company Blog

Bad Things

by Adam Zack — August 25, 2021

“Celebrate bad things that happen to you.”

When I was about 11 I got in a motorbike crash. It was summer in Palm Desert, where my brother Mike and I would have to go and spend a month with our dad, who was divorced from our mom. We’d try and think of things to do in the 100+ degree heat while Dad was at work and his wife sat in the house smoking Salem cigarettes, drinking Pepsi and watching her soap operas. My dad had this little Suzuki mini bike motorcycle and we’d go ride it around. No helmets, no padded clothing. Probably just wore flip flops for shoes, too. Our stoner neighbor Jimmy Bender had been doing wheelies on the bike and flipped it over backwards, breaking off the tail light and leaving only twisted metal for a rear fender. So Mike and I are out behind my dad’s house in the big dirt lot and set up a ramp to jump the motorcycle. Sounded like a good idea at the time. On my first jump I went very far and came down hard, holding the handle bars (where the brakes were) as the rest of my body slid off toward the back of the bike. The rear tire took a patch of skin off my right thigh (hair still scarcely grows there, probably a good thing since I have so much hair everywhere else except my head and ankles) and as I let go of the handle bars, my chest dragged across the jagged metal rear bumper where stupid, stoned Jimmy Bender had broken it off. It cut through my shirt and into my chest and I was bleeding like a stuck pig. Mike immediately saw the bloodbath and started crying (he was only 10 and probably thought I was dying). I got up, got on the motorcycle and had him get on the back and rode us to my dad’s house. My grandpa, also named Adam, who was there visiting, saw me and said “Oh Jesus! Oh God! He’s cut his heart out!” What happened next kind of blurs together, but I ended up at the hospital with 15 stitches put in my chest and a huge patch of raw skin on my leg (which hurt much more than the chest) and got to lay on the couch that night and have ice cream and watch The Six Million Dollar Man.

So what’s the point of this story? No one likes to have to recall bad things. In fact, most people hate it when bad things happen. It was a quote I read from the writer David Sedaris: “Celebrate bad things that happen to you because you can write about it.” Just don’t ask me to show you where I almost cut my nipple off.