Down She Goes

I fall a lot. Most recently, outside a movie theatre after a well-attended premiere. It was icy, but I can’t really use that as an excuse. I just wasn’t watching where I was going.

Suddenly, I was airborne, all 5 “9” of me and the 3-inch heels I was wearing. The contents of my purse yard-saled it onto the concrete.

In front of a small crowd of onlookers, as I laughed maniacally. Because, really, what else could I do?

The two ladies who scraped me off the sidewalk were gracious, and told me I’d “looked so great as I was going down,” which is how I knew it had been really bad. The following morning, my knees looked like a Rorschach test.

This was just one in a string of many incidents, the most memorable being a fall at work. I’d slipped on a patch of wet floor and careened into a stack of milkcrates. The restaurant’s security cameras caught me sprawling out like a young deer, the tray I’d been holding shooting for the sky, as if I was reaching for a handhold. I just narrowly missed cracking my head on a steel post.

A ton of people saw exactly how it happened, because the manager on duty that night put the footage up on the restaurant’s Facebook page. Customers and staff delighted in my misfortune until one of the owners saw it and insisted the video be taken down.

In the end, it was lucky that the footage caught the eyes of so many. When I turned out to have torn something in the fall, my employers were less than supportive.

“How can we be sure you sustained these injuries at work?” my boss asked.

“About a hundred people know that this happened on the job,” I fired back.

In way, I think these situations are just karma. Some years ago, I worked at a restaurant that had windows all down one side. Through the wall of glass, it was easy to the alleyway with its slick, painted concrete. There was always someone running down it, and the falls I saw in the presence of rain or snow were spectacular: women in gold lamé and six-inch heels splayed out on the icy ground, their purses landing half a block away.

On many nights, I stood indoors, being berated by a sour-faced women. I blocked them out and peered out the window, smirking at a man who’d deigned to wear shorts in December, a man who was now pulling clods of frozen snow from beneath them.

And I took a sick sort of pleasure in the knowledge that at least someone was having a slightly worse day than I was.

Warsaw, Poland.