Which Door

 Which Door    
by Doorwrecker Doug

I learned to throw a knife when I was sixteen, in 1963, in the back yard against the outhouse. Dad replaced the old heavy plywood garage door with a  lightweight metal one and let me do with the discarded one whatever I wished. I set it up against the outhouse (two layers of three quarter inch fir plywood, it weighed well over 150 pounds). This became my knife-throwing target. 
     First, there was making a knife. With a heavy, no longer sharp enough to work, twelve inch file, I made use of Klippenstein’s grinder (in their hundred year old barn next door) to form it, getting rid of the filing ridges and both shaping a point at one end and thinning the two blunt, thick steel edges to sharp ones. 
    That done, next came painting a circle about two feet in diameter with a six inch black spot in its center. Then, lastly, it was the first sip of an ice-cold Molsen’s after a day in August piling bales to the rafters in a dusty hayloft at 110 degrees of heat. So to speak. That is, standing an instinctual distance from the white garage door and throwing the homemade blade toward the target for the first time. I tended to throw hard and the first time it stuck I realized it had penetrated through at least one layer of plywood.
     I got good at it. Really good. I could stick it deep into the circle ten times out of ten and into the bullseye eight of them. I loved throwing the knife and did it every day for hours. It was one of the things I loved among five or six others at the time. I loved riding my bike, I loved secretly making homemade wine from my mother’s preserves, I loved reading and did it, I can only guess now, about thee hours a day in summer, I loved sitting in the greenhouse (when my mother wasn’t there) in early spring, April, snow still everywhere, with the sun having heated it up, reading a book and smoking my pipe filled with Sail tobacco (the yellow package), and I loved dreaming about living in a log cabin way up in the north woods. 
     When grade 12 finally finished, I enrolled at Canadian Mennonite Bible College, where I stayed for the first half year before deciding that I needed more adventure prepatory to became a teacher, prepatory to attempting again to get myself educated. While I was at the college a variety of incidents coloured my life and imagination. One, a student in a room along the corridor of the residence stank. I should say, his room stank, and it stank so fouly that anyone passing his open door without pinching his nose and making a run for it deserved a medal for heroism. In the end the information leaked that his feet and socks gave out the stench. We all wondered, and frequently argued about the possibilities of smells of such extreme intensity. How could anyone become remotely accustomed to such a horridness of odour, even when his own? How in the first place could a body possibly produce a vileness of that magnitude and order? I shall not disclose any names. I am confident that the person responsible has already spent a lifetime of shame and regret at a body order that was (and likely still is) beyond manageability.
     Two, I myself found about myself that armpits cause uneasiness and self-doubt as well as self-hatred and the questioning of the purposes of the universe when one’s age has not yet exceeded 20 years. At 18 to produce such a relentless sweatiness and therefore also the accompanying sourness and saltiness of smell, stabs and pushes and hits and tears away at the happiness at the very foundations of one’s being and desire for life! Male teenage years are uncompromising for the way that they force things on one, force one into recognizing one’s own dysfunctionality, one’s miserable weaknesses. 
     Finally, to get back to knife throwing. Bored and less than engaged in studying Old Testament and singing in Wiebe’s choir, I spent a lot of time sitting on my bed reading. During this time I had much opportunity to create for myself diversions. One diversion that struck me suddenly was knife throwing. Why not begin to throw my knife? And so I did that. The door made an obvious backdrop and though I did not draw a target on it, I did, one afternoon, in a special state of dumpiness, take up my knife (the reborn file) and throw it at the the door. Wallah, it stuck. I rejoiced, my mood lessened fractionally. I retrieved the knife now sticking through the first layer of door paneling, went back to the bed, resumed my indolent position, half sitting half lying, and flung the knife again. Sure enough, it stuck once more. Over the next month the door became not a door so much as a hole created by hundreds of scars and rips from the knife throws.
    You asked me whether I am ashamed of what I did then? Maybe. I had a weirdness about me, I must admit (which by now, of course, has abated and left me normal, orderly, considerate and malleable to the wishes of those in authority, to my superiors). I did things that crossed social borders even then. I never received any official message from the administration of the college charging me for the cost of a new door. But I did receive unofficial messages from many young men who had heard the story of the idiot In room 110 at the end of the hall at CMBC who threw his knife into the door, and luckily never hit anyone who happened to just be coming through at that time.