Why yes, yes I did! I even had to go the hospital to get it removed. Thanks for bringing it up!
Sixth grade chorus class was remarkably boring, lacking such a severe amount of fun and whimsy I would place it behind competitive weather stripping and unpaid snail wrangling on the list of activities I enjoy. We never got to sing anything fun, like “The Humpty Dance” or “2 Legit To Quit.” Heck, we rarely even sang full songs – most of the time, we just stood around shouting repetitive vocal exercises like “Bagel With Cream Cheese” in pinched and flat falsettos. Our teacher claimed this would somehow improve our prepubescent voices. I can’t speak for the rest of the class, but at the end of the day, I was no closer to being Michael Bolton than when I woke up. Repeatedly warbling “Bagel with cream cheese!” for thirty minutes a day just made me hate bagels.
On top of that, we were not afforded the luxury of desks in chorus class. Instead, we had the cold, grey reality of folding chairs, the cushion-free metal kind that reminded one of Dwight Eisenhower or the Industrial Revolution. With no flat surface to rest our hands or graffiti juvenile message on, we were a restless bunch. Some busied their appendages by making paper airplanes or committing petty crime (I still haven’t forgiven the kid who sat next to me, J. Shickles, for taking a pair of sewing scissors and cutting the straps right off my L.L. Bean backpack; those things cost money, you airbrushed Wolf shirt-wearing asshole). Me, I probably sat around doodling pictures of Norman Schwarzkopf in my Trapper Keeper, hoping this damn Gulf War would end sometime before Damon Wayans left “In Living Color.”
One day, after our teacher had forced us to slide our chairs all over creation to “get the best sound possible” out of a room of tone-deaf twelve year olds, I decided to explore the underside of my seat to see if there was any dried gum or boogers I could smear into J. Shickles’ hair. I found nothing but a metal loop with a hole just big enough for my right middle finger. Of course I slid it through, although I don’t think I quite realized the sexual connotations of such an act. At that age, I still firmly believed the female vagina was akin to the creature in Alien, shooting out from between its host’s legs with a slimy hiss and enveloping anything that dared get close to it. I was a pretty dumb kid.

Moriarty to my Holmes.
After a few minutes, I decided it was time to free my writing hand so I could scribble down something completely inane, like “Joey B. has the AIDS” or “Megadeth rocks and you know it!!!!” Imagine my fears when my joint would not pass back through the hole in question! How could this be? I struggled for a few minutes, desperate to show this hole what for. Remembering an old episode of “MacGuyver,” I theorized shoving more of my finger into the hole and attempting to quickly extract it would probably work.
Wrong.
The metal loop now grasped my chubby digit at the base, just above the knuckle, and there was absolutely no give. It was jammed in there like Silly Putty. This is when the real fear began. I could feel my flesh changing color and slightly swelling. Blood was being cut off. The chair was attempting to fell my favorite instrument for picking my nose and flipping the bird! Action had to be taken immediately. I raised my left hand. The teacher called on me, and I attempted to stand up. I could only get about half way. Hunched over like Quasimodo, I explained the situation at hand.
“My finger is stuck in this chair. I need to go to the nurse.”
There was a moment of brief silence before the class broke into insane laughter. During that hush, you could see a collective look of confusion and disgust about the room. Everyone had been waiting for the first character-destroying moment of the 1990-91 school year. Some thought it would come from the Kid Who Wore Earplugs The Size Of Baby Carrots & Always Wore Track Suits. Others kept their eye on the Kid Who Clogged, certain that at some point he would spill his lunch all over his Z Cavariccis and begin bawling like Sally Field. Alas, those kids managed to keep their stupidity in check (that year, at least) while I found myself mired in possibly the biggest inaugural goof East Ridge Middle had ever seen. I can’t even think of anything that compares (not even the Kid Who Fainted During German Class In Seventh Grade Because He Couldn’t Handle Conjugating The Verb “Bekommen”).
I was quickly ushered out of the chorus room and to the school nurse, who seemed annoyed by my presence. I can understand that – I’m sure she had legitimately sick children to deal with, and here was Johnny Finger Chair, who really only needed a hacksaw and a smack on the head. Sadly, the janitors all refused to wield any kind of tool to free my trapped digit. This is not because they were pussies – we would later learn that the janitors had been instructed before the start of that school year to saw every loop off the chorus room folding chairs so nothing like this would happen. Lazy and belligerent (what middle school janitor worth his salt isn’t?), the custodial staff ignored this administrative demand. No kid is that dumb, they surely thought.
They hadn’t met Jim Greene.
Confronted with the scenario they assumed would never happen, the shocked janitors plead whatever amendment you plead when a kid gets his finger caught in a folding chair and refused to get involved. Could we have sued the school over this incident? Sure, if my family had not already been involved in a crazy lawsuit at the time. Our legal resources allocated elsewhere, East Ridge Middle got away with making me look the fool when it was really their fault. I’ll get them back one day, perhaps when I’m a famous author and they ask me to come dedicate the new branch of their library named in my honor. I’ll show up without cuff links or a belt, which will embarrass them to no end, I’m sure. Oh yes, my poor dress habits will shame you back to the stone age, you evil institution of tween education!

He’s smiling because that bottle is filled with dirty mop water.
Anyway, my mother eventually showed up at school and made the executive decision to call an ambulance. I’ll never forget being wheeled out the front doors of the school, the chair resting on my lap, mere moments after lunch ended. A crowd of eight graders surrounded me as if I were a reclusive, terminally ill celebrity. They ogled me as if I were Garbo; I could look not a one of them in the eye. In the ambulance, they strapped me down to the gurney and merely reseted the chair on top of me. Every time the meat wagon took a sharp turn, the chair slid off me, twisting my now purple finger into even more pain. To his credit, the driver soothed my pain by cranking up some Kansas and tapping along on the steering wheel. Nothing heals you faster than “Dust In The Wind.”
At Danbury Hospital, I was greeted by a blood-soaked doctor not unlike Dave Foley in those “Kids In The Hall” skits. He greased my finger up with some alien gel, whipped out a tiny saw, and finally liberated me from my metal captor. By this point, I was numb to everyone’s laughter and smirks. I just wanted to go home, sit in bed with my bandaged finger, and read the latest issue of Cracked. Sadly, my mother was a proponent of tough love. She drove me right back to school, where I entered my sixth period art class to a wave of sarcastic claps and laughter.
From that day on, my fate was sealed as one of the biggest losers in all of Connecticut. No one ever let me forget that a piece of furniture had been my Waterloo. Girls refused to talk to me. I was picked last for every team in gym for fear I’d accidentally be immobilized by the bleachers. Even my friends ragged on me, and these were people who spent all their free time collecting comic books and watching “Facts Of Life” reruns. You know you’ve hit rock bottom when people who aspire to be as cool as Mindy Cohen are giving you a hard time.

She was our Fonzie, even though Jo was more Fonzie-like.
Thankfully, my family moved to Florida after the ninth grade, where I was afforded to opportunity to start anew. The chair incident was kept secret as I learned to play guitar and developed my persona as semi-class clown. By senior year, I was actually going on dates that weren’t cruel pranks, and I didn’t have to beg anyone to sign my yearbook. People volunteered. I had succeeded. My legacy was no longer a hospital visit as a result of too much finger exploration.
So my advice to any of you youngsters who’ve recently experienced a major social embarrassment? Convince your parents to move. Send your father’s résumé to as many different time zones as possible. Sabotage all your mother’s real estate deals. Tell them you’ll become a “cutter” unless the family immediately relocates to Beaver Falls, MN. Do whatever it takes to run away from your problem. Sure, starting over won’t be easy or necessarily all that fun, but take solace in the fact no one will call you “The Fartmaster” or “Rhino Tits” ever again (unless God really has it out for you).