The world looks different from the wrong side of a busted beak.
I break my nose like Iverson broke ankles, with something like three fractures to my name. As I write, I’m sprawled out in front of a Law & Order rerun with an ice pack perched gingerly on top of my freshly-broken sniffer, trying to guess whether I’ll look like a Picasso when the swelling goes down. Every few hours, I hear from my mother and promise her I haven’t bled to death yet.
Unlike my ma, though, I’ve come to accept life with a few extra twist and turns to my smile.
Not that I’m thrilled to put another dent in my face – this time because of a rugby tackle gone bad. Sure, I’ll cop to a tinge of macho pride, but broken noses are bad business. They swell and change colors and they bleed like crazy. Sometimes both eyes will go black, leaving you looking like a lumpy raccoon. Strangers tend to avoid you at night, and people start to wonder if you moonlight as a mugger on weekends.
But once the swelling subsides, it’s easy enough to learn to love your broken face.
In the old John Wayne movie “The Comancheros,” the villain delivers a monologue about how he hopes his daughter will choose to love a man with a broken nose, because she’ll know that he would fight for her. Granted, the Duke, with his hopelessly crooked honker, doesn’t wind up with that particular damsel-she opts for straight-nosed Stuart Whitman-but he does pile up one of the highest body counts in any of his Westerns, and winds up happily married to boot.
Writer Nelson Algren compared Chicago to a woman with a broken nose: “You may well find lovelier lovelies, but never a lovely so real.” Not being particularly lovely to begin with, I’ll settle for being real, at least in the way Algren meant it. Nothing gives a face character quite like some well-placed physical trauma.
Just look at Marlon Brando, who managed to become a sex symbol despite busting his nose while sparring on the set of “A Streetcar Named Desire.” Brando went to high school in a suburb 30 minutes from my house, making him the perfect inspiration for a young man growing up tall, dark and nasally fractured.
Of course, even Brando attempted to get his nose reset after his accident. This Friday, I’ll find out if I have to do the same, once the swelling subsides enough for the Ear, Nose and Throat doctor to tell me whether I need a more advanced treatment than Tylenol and a sense of humor.
I’m not so stubborn that I won’t let the doctor fix it – I’ll trade a face with character for my sense of smell any day of the week – but I hope the doctor tells me he won’t have to do a thing to my nose.
Because if Brando was a fresh face in Hollywood today, he wouldn’t last a week before a plastic surgeon fixed that nose, right before a stylist waxed his chest and frosted his hair. Today’s America likes its stars to be perfect, symmetrical, buffed, scrubbed and sterilized. Even Algren’s Chicago doesn’t look quite so crook-nosed as she used to, although the city is still plenty crooked.
There was a time when broken bones and knotted features could be a sign of a life fully lived instead of a flaw, when our Hollywood heroes were sometimes even more battered and beaten than we were. I don’t expect that to come back into fashion, and I don’t wish broken bones on anybody. But a pronounced curve to your nose provides a little bit of perspective and a nice check to your vanity – you’ll never look perfect again, so maybe you realize that isn’t so important.
As the swelling subsides, my nose still looks decidedly broken, and my poor mother still doesn’t seem too pleased. For at least for the next few days, though, I can wear it like a badge of pride. I think Brando and the Duke would approve.
Mike Carson is a Weinberg senior. He can be reached at [email protected]
