I got stabbed

‘You killed me, you bastards, you fuckin’ killed me!’

Morgan Modjeski, staff illustration by ted barker

As I walked down the road with my thumb extended long and proud, I still had quite a bit of faith in humanity. It was a dark and lonely June night, and there I was strolling down the sidewalk on a suburban street in Winnipeg not giving a damn about much, trying to catch a ride, thinking that this city was all right and fine but I was wrong. I would soon find this out.

While walking, I noticed a van had stopped not far from where I was walking and I thought maybe this was my chance to get a ride

However, the next thing I knew two figures were getting out of the van and running across the deserted street towards to where I was standing. I noticed this and picked up my pace, but they immediately that they did the same. It wasn’t long before the two of them had walked up beside me, one on either side, and before I really knew what was going on the two of them were yelling at me in a hostile tone.

“What the fuck. You gave us the bird, man,” one of the individuals yelled in my face. He was tall, lanky, and wearing a pair of cheap sunglasses (which was confusing because it was rounding 2 a.m.) “No man,” I said back. “I was just trying to get from here to there.” As I pointed a finger down the road I felt a heavy smack and saw a bright flash of light. But while this was happening something was else was occurring — something much more horrible — his friend, who I had not really seen, had chopped a seven inch gash into the back of my right knee. At the time I thought he hit me with a wrench or tire iron, but a few moments later that I saw the water-like flow of blood spurting from my body.

“Those motherfuckers cut me!” I said aloud to myself, as I saw my two assailants flee the crime scene. I continued to repeat this, but, unlike the initial utterance which was cool and almost calm, these last screams were desperate and frightened. I now knew the seriousness of the situation and I had realized that those bastards had not just cut me — they had tried to end my life.

There was an initial moment where my instinct just told me to just lay down and pray to God that someone would come by to help me live, but then my actual instincts kicked in and told me to keep on walking to a payphone that I knew was four blocks away

While walking I screamed and yelled basically random crap into the night where absolutely no one would hear me. Most of the yelling was directed at the two people who had assaulted me in the first place. I remember yelling things like: “You killed me, you bastards, you fuckin’ killed me!” Then I realized that this was no time to panic; it was a time to buckle the fuck down and face the terrible facts.

The fact is that I had two options: lie down and bleed to death like some wounded animal who never really had a chance or bite my lip and stumble my body down the sidewalk to the payphone, bloody leg and all.

By this time I was angrier than I was afraid. I heard myself yell again, this time enraged: “You killed me you fuckin’ bastards, you fuckin’ killed me!” My panic had dissipated, and that is when I first reached back to feel the gap where the back of my leg used to be. I thought at first I would be fine, knowing that my body would be releasing enough endorphins and adrenaline to keep me going, but as I stumbled on I noticed the pain getting more extreme, and my body getting weaker.

My anger dissipated just as fast. Then came a heavy wave of remorse. I had gone through the first two stages of death or dying — fear and anger —and now finally I was going into the stage a person goes into before they die: the realization stage; the stage where one starts to look over his or her life and realize how good they have it.

At that point I was just starting to give up but then, after five minutes of bleeding and yelling, I realized that I had walked right past the phone booth where I had planned to call my dad. Good thing I only passed it by a few feet.

While at the phone booth, I thought that now I might survive this terrible night and that maybe everything was going to be fine. I reached into the side-pocket of my Hawaiian shorts to find that not only had they cut me open, but they had also cut a slit in my pocket — the pocket where I kept my change.

I was searching around the pocket, feeling with my hand the sticky blood that had soaked into my shorts and the steady flow of blood escaping from my leg, and through all of this mess I located a small amount of change that had stuck in the far corner of the pocket. I whipped out a loonie and tried to insert it into the slot, but of course the model of phone was two years older than most phones, and only accepted quarters, dimes, and nickels.

I remember then slamming a fist into the phone booth and another fist back into the blood-filled pocket. Finally, I found myself a quarter. I slid it into the machine, dialled my home phone number, and waited for someone to pick up.

“Hello,” the voice on the other end of the phone said in a sleepy voice, I knew right away it was my dad. “Dad,” I screamed into the phone. “Some motherfuckers sliced me up, I’m fucking dying.” No hesitation on the other end of the phone. “Where are you?”

Two minutes later my dad was flying over the median towards where I had told him I was. He emerged from the car holding a large towel and asking me where they had cut me. I showed him the wound, and he answered in a solid-but-frightened tone, “Jesus, apply pressure.”

He went on to ask me what had happened, and I gave him all the details — how the assailants had thought I gave them the finger, how they jumped out of the van and sliced me open, and how I had walked the four blocks screaming and cursing. And now I was in a warm car trying to stop the life from dripping out of me.

We arrived at the hospital in no time at all — three minutes max. Once I arrived at the hospital, the nurse at the front desk saw me limp into the ER holding a once-white, blood-soaked cloth on the back of my leg, and they immediately took me into a back room, laid me on my stomach, and told me to wait for a doctor. About five minutes passed before a doctor came in and started to work on the back of my bloody leg. About two hours and 33 stitches later, I could barely walk.

The rest of my summer was great, considering the fact that I got stabbed. In the end, I did get a large sum of money from victim compensation trying to make up for the work I lost while out-of-commission. I can now safely say that no amount of free money in the world would tempt me to relive that bullshit experience inflicted upon me by some crazed, nameless assailants. Every morning when I stretch, two years after the incident, a nerve that never healed properly shakes rapidly when the muscle it’s supposed to be in contact with cannot be found.