LIMPING WITH STYLE
50 YEARS OF DEFYING NATURE
MIKE CARAVELLA
MAY 4, 2026
May the 4th, 1976. Sorry Star Wars fans... I had dibs on the date first.
East New York, Brooklyn. My childhood hometown. If you know anything of this time and place, war-torn Middle East cities have nothing on it. Mike Tyson lived 6 blocks away from me. I didn’t know him. But my brother Joe claims Tyson stole his bike. While he was riding it. Who knows if this is true, but who am I to get in the way of a good story?
Dad was a bookie, number runner, loan shark for the Gambinos. He tried the straight jobs after getting out of the Air Force and being 24 years old with a wife and two kids. But being young and Sicilian combined with a crazy amount of balls, the allure of easier money on the street proved to be too great for him. Mom worked as a dental assistant so they had income on the books. Dad was a bit crazy, but never stupid.
Dad would pick me up every day from my aunt’s house where I would stay until 4:30 after school, after he picked my brother up from school, after he made his drop to the Captains at the social club, after he made his rounds in the afternoon for the daily number. There was no state-run lottery back then. Sports betting. Number betting. Predatory lending. Everything my dad did then, is legal now.
Dad, Joe and I crossed the street from the car to our brownstone apartment when I remembered I left my bookbag in the backseat and ran back across to go get it. Crossing for the third time was the charm when I took the broadside hit from a 1975 Cadillac Fleetwood speeding down our street with no intention of stopping. It was a mom driving with her own child in the front seat, while she dragged me underneath the car for half a city block with no intent on stopping. She only did because my dad gave chase and jumped in the passenger-side window. Joe, 11 years old, watched the whole thing unfold. Coming loose several feet behind, my 7-year-old body laid crumpled in the street.
I remember looking up and seeing people gather around me. I smelled oil, and was scared because I thought I would get in trouble for getting my Catholic school uniform dirty. The nuns would definitely brandish the ruler at me tomorrow. I didn’t recognize anyone. It just seemed like strangers were gathering around me, even though I knew all the neighbors on the block. I tried to get up. Everyone told me just to lie there, which was a good idea as my right femur was snapped in half. Compound fracture.
One of the kids from the neighborhood ran down to my mom’s office, just three blocks away, to tell her what happened. She ran down the street to get there, just as I was getting loaded into the ambulance, and jumped in. When I was in the emergency room, they brought in the priest to give me my last rites. Ironically, I had just received my first communion two days earlier. Good timing on their part. Only 48 hours after vesting me in, they had my soul for eternity they thought. My dad arrived at the hospital to find the priest praying over me. Thinking I was dead, he fainted and dropped to the floor.
My parents haven’t really told me a clear story of the events of that day. A pattern that would continue with all of our family history. But based on my injuries, here is what I can put together. I took the full brunt of impact on my right side, causing my leg fracture and displaced hip. The burn scars on my back are probably from me being tangled up in the exhaust system while I was dragged. And the scars on my head are from the lacerations from being dribbled like a basketball between the car and the street.
I don’t remember a lot from the recovery time, being just a month shy of my eighth birthday. The most vivid memory is from my extended stay in the ICU. The discomfort of the constant pulling of the sandbags hanging from my ankles to try to straighten my leg and hip out before they could entomb me in my plaster cast coffin for six months with giant metal pins driven through my leg. (The removal of those pins, half a year later, banged out with a rubber mallet, is pretty vivid as well.) Full body cast from the top of my chest to the tips of my toes. And then six months of lying in a hospital bed in my parent’s room, through the summer, with no air conditioning.
My parents would parade the relatives past me on the weekends, like paying their respects to the stiff at a wake. I do remember Uncle Frank, my dad’s brother, always jokingly threatening to pull the towel off that covered the hole around my crotch area so I can use a bedpan and piss can. Other than that, I spent a lot of time alone. I honestly don’t remember seeing my brother all that much during this time. Being a front-row witness to that horror show, he was probably way too freaked out to deal with it.
I got a lot of stuffed animals as presents that I would talk to night and day, a behavior that would carry on long after my recovery time and somewhat to this day. When I wasn’t talking to my toys, I was doing endless pull-ups in the bed from a triangle that hung over me. I still do that too. Not the pull-ups in the bed, but the workout mentality. That was life, from May until November 1976.
We moved to Queens shortly after I was removed from the cast. Mom said the accident was the last straw for Brooklyn. Dad disagreed. Mom won. Even though I was out of the cast, recovery had just begun. I couldn’t walk without a walker. And my healed right leg was stiff and immobile. I spent most of my time sitting on the couch or bed with my leg extended out. My Dad would just carry me a lot when we went out. Maybe it was his way of trying to make up for something he didn’t cause. Or maybe he thought he would save me some embarrassment from using the walker. It didn’t. I felt the gawking. And I heard the whispers around me… “Cripple”. “Retard”.
After about a year and a half of me hermiting, Mom decided I needed a little nudge back out into the world, and forcibly signed me up for Little League baseball. It was a transformational event for me. I could barely walk, let alone run and jump. But for some reason sports brought out my already developed toughness and fighting spirit, and I was hooked. And that mentality I carried with me not only through decades of playing and coaching multiple sports, but in every other facet of my existence.
And I would need it too. This wouldn’t be my last dance with near death experiences. I blow that nine lives mythos out of the water. Some of it force majeure. Some of it force de Mike. We’ll get into most of them in future episodes here.
So on this 50-year anniversary, when you see that guy with the air of confidence and the cocky strut, that’s just your perception. The supposed confidence is a survival mechanism. This introverted poor kid from East New York has had no choice but to stay tough. And that cocky strut is actually my bowed right leg that sits about an eighth of an inch shorter than my left, coupled with my lifelong chronic back pain from my crooked body. As I told my cancer doctors years later when I pulled myself off of the pain meds, “The pain lets me know I’m still here.”
As Governor Jesse “The Body” Ventura says in Predator, “I ain’t got time to bleed.”
