Crack Addiction

For as long as I can remember I’ve had an obsession with cracking joints. Primarily the knuckles in my fingers and toes though when I reached my early teens I was pretty pleased to discover a number of other parts of my body that were crackable. At around 10, I discovered purely by chance that I could crack my sternum (a friend stepping on me during a sleepover opened that door for me) and thanks to the wonders of TV I discovered that necks and backs were meant to crack too.

When I was 11 years old and away at summer school I went through a month’s worth of spending money in the first week, so I, along with some industrious roommates, opened a massage parlor/amateur chiropractor’s office in our dormitory to supplement our incomes. Meredith was the pimp in this arrangement, booking appointments and counting the money. For $5, one of our classmates could either have a 10 minute massage form the lovely Keelia or they could have me crush their back until it popped and twist their head until their neck snapped. For the bargain rate of $8 they could enjoy both our services. It never occurred to any of us that I could seriously hurt someone, and to be fair to my young self, I never did. But I never the less shudder at the image of preteens experimenting on each other thus.

When I returned home from that lucrative summer (and lucrative it was!), I no longer had business partners sleeping in the twin beds next to mine, ready and willing to walk on my back or twist my neck, and so I had to get inventive. I dreamed of one day building a machine that would come down from the ceiling and do compressions on my back to crack it. The time I put into mentally constructing this contraption could probably have been better spent on things like completing my math homework or learning a second language, but instead I considered the safety of my machine (because for my back, safety was a concern, however, for my neck…). It seemed unwise to leave everything up to motors, wheels, and buttons. And to make the machine useful to more than just me, it would have to be adjustable for varying shapes and sizes, controlled with a series of pulleys that I imagined I could fashion out of jump ropes. In the end, I imagined it being a completely manually operated contraption, controlled by the user. I imagined a 1 to 20 pressure ratio, with the user laying on his or her stomach on a massage table, arms laid either down to one’s side or in the “put your hands up and freeze” position and small Steven Hawking-style controllers just in reach that would control two huge wheels to come down, one on either side of the spine, and in a bottom-up motion, crack my back. There would also, of course, be a dead man’s switch in case of mechanical error, though the only error I could imagine was gear rust. The machine was perfect. However the cost for construction and upkeep, not to mention the space required for installation, was prohibitive and so the dream died without a single model built.

After I stopped fantasizing about an elaborate way to crack my back, I moved on to elaborate ways to crack my neck. Actually, not so elaborate; pretty obvious really. When I was around 14, my parents bought me a bed frame with a head and baseboard that had a series of metal bars arranged vertically, like a baby’s crib. Fortunately, unlike a baby’s crib, these bars were far enough apart to get your head through, though not quite wide enough to get the rest of yourself through. Perfect.

I spent countless evenings, mornings, afternoons with my head wedged safely between the bars of my bed, pulling with my arms until my neck snapped. It was a sensation like no other, and an obsession that lasted years after I was forced to stop, having been caught in the act by my mother who shrieked, “What the hell!?” and then spent 10 minutes telling me about how the lead singer of INXS had recently died from asphyxiation mid-sexual gratification. I was too uncomfortable and astounded by her assumption that I was partaking in such an act to explain myself and so I sat there silently until she finally left the room. On one hand, I wish I could explain to my mother what I was doing (but then we would have to admit to this little episode rather than continue to pretend that it never happened) but on the other hand, the shame of this talk prevented me from ever putting my head between those bars again, which may have prevented me from becoming a paraplegic.

After 14, I got obsessed with other things. Namely, boys. And my social life picked up enough that I no longer spent Friday nights devising ways to slip a disc. Though to this day, I occasionally drift away at work and dream of a man who can give me everything I really want, who is tall, and kind, and funny, and can pick me up by my head, if my neck is feeling especially tight.