The Lap Dance
Contrary to my declared plans more than a year ago, I’m finally making use of the paywall for the first time. This was written with the aim of including it within my still-pending memoir. Maybe it will still make the cut.
This is the story of how I tore my ACL while giving someone a lap dance. It’s also a story about Obama.
The year is 2013. Within a few hours of landing in the city during a trip, my friends and I hit the town. Bar-hopping from place to place, and accumulating a large snowball of acquaintances as we went along. Our final stop was going to be at an after-hours dance nightclub, the kind that stayed open until sunrise and where you’d find lone electronic music connoisseurs bopping their heads in a corner somewhere with their arms crossed.
We were a ball, and danced up a storm. My homies had such confidence and swagger on the dance floor that the crowd would do that thing where they part and give you a wide berth to give a space for your flailing limbs. Just like Moses. At one point, one of my buddies disengaged and sat down to check on his phone. In a bid to reengage him, I went up to his chair and started giving him a lap dance. Naturally. It got his attention.
I should discuss my lap dance technique. The kinesiology behind it. Obviously it involves a lot of active hip work, and making that happen in a structurally sound manner requires a solid foundation. Thankfully, years of squats and deadlifts gave me the lower body fortitude to support me during the high intensity core gyrations required. [If anyone requires a visual aid for this next section, please print out my picture and paste it onto a stick figure. If you’re too poor to have a printer at home, I can’t help you.]
My lap dances took two different distinct formats — frontal and rearal. The rearal has two distinct advantages in its favor: solid structural stability and the best theater seat of my ass. I’d have both feet firmly planted, bent over, and I could use even use my arms for additional — overkill — structural support. Without the hindsight benefit of an engineering degree, I nevertheless strove to approach the craft with the methodical precision it demanded. Halfway to designing real bridges.
The frontal required the most dexterity. It’s the most structurally precarious (FORESHADOWING ALERT) but also provides the most direct access to my genital area, which I’m told scores very well with lap dancing judges. The frontal approach is impossible to pull off without carefully incorporating the surrounding architecture.
To my benefit, my unwitting audience happened to have picked a chair with a side table. Possibilities abounded.
The Austrian economist Friedrich Hayek wrote insightfully about human beings’ knack for generating spontaneous order, emerging seemingly out of chaos. I’m confident in my guarantee that he never ever once contemplated that his contribution to the field of human knowledge would ever get applied to describe a lap dance competition in an after-hours nightclub, yet here we are. Within a few seconds of me establishing an apparent lap dance tradition, another friend joined the fray and formed a lap dancing trifecta, flanking the chair from both sides.
Everyone assumed their role without instructions, and we transformed into a well-oiled rotating machine. Whoever was the sittee would tap out and become the lap dancer, while one of the lap dance providers would then rotate for a brief opportunity to sit on the throne. This went on for a while. Hayek would’ve been proud.
So I found myself in the instigating position once again, as one of the lap dancers. I’ve deployed a combination of frontal and rearal hip gyrations, and I built up enough confidence to kick it up a notch. My left leg would be planted on the ground while the other would be perched on the side table, therefore affording the most direct access to my precious genitals. No gatekeeping. My left leg was doing Allah’s work and shouldering significant support duty as my hips violently gyrated in a circular motion from back to front.
Then, this didn’t actually happen but I suddenly felt like someone had violently kicked me right on the side of my supporting knee. My leg buckled and I fell backwards on the floor. My compatriots all around me looked perturbed, mildly alarmed. Everyone saw me fall, but falling is normal within these environs.
But from my vantage point, I looked down at my leg and saw it twisted outward in what seemed to be a very unnatural position. As concerning as that was, there was nothing else for me to do except stand up. So I did, and in the process I heard crunching and popping coming from my knee, at levels that pierced through the decibel cacophony of the nightclub. And even louder still, I felt searing debilitating pain. I became a human infrastructure disaster, an avatar for load-bearing hubris.
There was nothing I could do to assuage it. I tried sitting down. I tried laying down on a corner of the dance floor. I tried folding it. I tried stretching it out. I tried gritting and I tried sobbing. And it hurt. All of it hurt really bad.
The pain put me completely out of commission and there was nothing else to do except leave. My buddy paid for a Saturday night Uber to take us back to his apartment two blocks away, which just happened to be across the street from a police precinct. Sirens blared all through the night and any hopes I had of rendering myself unconscious to sleep the pain away was foiled.
Early in the morning, still throbbing pain and delirious from sleep deprivation, I hobbled into a taxi to an emergency room. We all know the horror potential of ER waiting rooms but, pro-tip alert, if you ever do have to visit an emergency room, there’s no better time than 6AM on a Sunday morning. ERs tend to be staffed up on the weekends to deal with all of the dumb shit people get into (👀) but by the morning the shitshow from the night before has already been processed out. The staff is almost done with their night shift and happy to go home soon. Everyone is in a buoyant vibrant mood.
I limped through the doors to the triage nurse and told her of my travails. “I hurt my knee. Dancing.” The waiting room was completely bare, no one else there, and so they immediately put me on a stretcher and wheeled into an examination room to be attended by several nurses with literally nothing else better to do. They asked me to again recount my predicament and I thought it appropriate to supplant the threadbare accounting I gave at triage. You know, to complete the record.
“So I was giving my friend a lap dance and—” I barely could get a few words in before one of them chuckled and interrupted me.
“I’m sorry…what?”
“Yeah, so I was giving my friend a lap dance and—”
She chuckled again, smiled wide, and interrupted again. “Can you hold on a sec?” and then left the room before I could verbally acquiesce. She quickly returned with four other people, a whole committee was evidently dedicated to my medical care. I felt so loved.
“Can you start over with what you were saying?”, smiling wider.
“Right. So I was giving my friend a lap dance and—” Again interrupted, with cacophony of laughter from everyone, but I was now undeterred. “—somehow I fell. And now my knee really hurts.”
Bless their souls, the staff tried really hard to be as professional as possible given the circumstances. I’m not a trained medical professional, and so I gave them every detail they asked for — how could I have known what would or wouldn’t be relevant to their treatment plan. They all listened rapturously and finally one of them said “I’m just going to put down ‘Dancing’ as the cause of injury, is that ok?”
“Yes, of course. I really just wanted to be precise and give you an accurate retelling of how I got to this position.”
This is finally the part where I get to talk about Obamacare.
One of the more obscure provisions of the Affordable Care Act turned out to be a billing technician’s wet dream. Nestled within its extensive pages was a mandate to overhaul and modernize medical billing systems nationwide, transitioning from the ICD-9 system, which had been the industry standard since the 1970s, to the vastly more detailed ICD-10 system.
Under the old ICD-9 framework, diagnoses were restricted to a vocabulary of about 13,000 codes, many of which were either vague or overly broad. A fall injury might get generically labeled as 959.9 - unspecified trauma. ICD-10 meanwhile expanded the vocabulary to over 68,000 codes, suddenly allowing for an astonishing level of granularity. You finally could have entries like W22.02XD: Walked into a lamppost, subsequent encounter or even the ever-elusive V95.44XD: Spacecraft fire injuring occupant, subsequent encounter.
As I retold my story to them, I had to relive the trauma I endured. I suffered through flashbacks of my humiliating hubris, and re-experienced the searing pain carried through my neurological system. And for what? All of that experience, that texture, that depth to just get compacted into ICD-9’s woefully inadequate E005.0: Activities involving dancing? What a cruel and pointless retraumatization (also known as F43.12 under ICD-10).
In that moment, this nurse was an avatar for mankind’s obsession with historical record-keeping. From the incessant memorization of Homer’s 24 books of the Iliad by ancient Greek bards, to the painstaking cataloging of every inch of natural gas pipelines underneath your sidewalk, she carried the torch. In her quest to accurately record my injury in all its viscera, she embodied this grand tradition of preserving human experiences, from the mythic to the mundane, ensuring that the tapestry of our collective past remains vivid and accessible to future generations.
And yet, her noble drive was foiled. Stymied by the powers that be. ICD-10 took years to adapt, and at the time my scribe asked for threads for her loom, she was frustrated by our imprecision. She wanted to memorialize my pain, using as many brush strokes as she could afford. But alas.
I am fortunate enough to have retained the wherewithal to retell my story with the level of exactitude it deserves. But not everyone has been so lucky, and we’ll never know how many trials of endurance have been lost to time, wisped away into dust because no scribe was available to document it.
Thanks Obama.
“Would it be unprofessional of us to ask for a re-enactment? Strictly for diagnostic purposes of course” the physician asked, with a twinkle in his eyes.
He tried to examine my knee, but it was swollen into a pamplemousse, with nothing they could’ve done anyways. So they told me to just rest, gave me some crutches, and sent me on my way. I hated the crutches immediately and tried to return them, but they understandably have no reason to accept returned medical equipment, and so I just left the $250 crutches Medicaid paid for (Thanks Obama!) against a bush outside the emergency room doors.
The rest of my trip to this city was obviously foiled. I barely could walk — hobble was more like it. I spent the remaining time shirtless in my friend’s basement, propping up my grapefruit leg up on a pillow, but managed to beat 1994’s X-COM: UFO Defense on Superhuman difficulty. On Ironman. (Woah, save some pussy for the rest of us, exclaimed the Chorus).
My trip concluded, the swelling subsided, I finally got my diagnosis: torn ACL. Somehow I had dislocated my knee cap during the lap dance, but then popped it back into place when I stood up — causing horrendous tendon damage and bone bruising in the process. I’m scheduled for surgery, but I can’t go through without first regaining the mobility on knee, stiffened from the swelling. I spent many hours on the floor of my room, gritting my teeth and using a towel to pull my knee downward beyond what it could do on its own.
Morning of the operation, the surgeon does one last check, mulls it over, then tells me that he doesn’t think my ACL was actually fully torn. Only partially. A few sessions of physical therapy and I’d be fine. I was.
So the ACL tear was only partial that one time, although that reprieve lasted for only a few years. It finally succumbed, for real this time, at an outdoor nightclub by the beach overlooking the Atlantic in Casablanca. Some fool challenged me to a dance-off that honor culture mandated I accept. We went at it hard as Major Lazer - Watch Out for This (Bumaye) blared on the speakers.
I absolutely won and humiliated the dude, as honor dictated, but during one particularly daring solo maneuver, I heard and felt a pop from my left knee. I’d won the dance-off, basked my moment of glory, but my ACL was definitively torn — sacrificed to the gods of competitive grinding. My hubristic shadow had finally caught up to me after all these years. The pamplemousse swelling was back.
The pieces of me were picked up and restitched. My old ACL was discarded into a biohazard wastebin, replaced with my harvested hamstring. Rehab stretched into months, then years. The courage to give lap dances again took much longer to return. Halting steps.
Katy’s birthday party was a pivotal moment. She was sitting in a chair opening her presents, and a dormant instinct resurfaced. I saw my opening to give her the best gift I could offer: front-row seats to my comeback. Katy’s momentary confusion blinked away into a delighted smile. I held onto the back of the chair and pinned her down with my hips as close as I could get, my mind bursting into a constellation of pseudo-calculus equations.
My friends interrupted, clamoring for my attention, momentarily pausing the spectacle. They asked if I was really sure. I again felt so loved, then looked them in the eye and said, “I’ve been waiting for this moment for years,” and went back to conclude my redemption arc.
And yet, not everyone was there to celebrate that moment with me. I’ll miss you forever my original anterior cruciate ligament tendon. You’ve accomplished so much for me during your tenure. Rest in piece.
So what I'm hearing is you're basically that dude who gets a ton of kids in the intro sequence of Idiocracy. I didn't know he was a lawyer.