The nurses told me I was lucky to be alive

The day started out innocently enough but ended with broken bones, brain contusions and ER nurses telling me that I was lucky to be alive. But I’ll start at the beginning.

It was a typical Friday and some of my friends and I were sitting on the porch drinking beer at 3:00 in the afternoon. We began to discuss what we were going to do that night. Our plans always involve alcohol so it wasn’t a question of IF we would be drinking, it was a question of where, with who, how much and for how long. I suggested that we play “century club” while we watched some football and then let the beer decide our fate. “Letting the beer decide” may have not been the best of ideas.

Around 7 someone came up with the idea of going to Austin to party on 6th street and bar hop. Now, almost none of us were 21 at the time, but being the enterprising young drunks we are, almost all of us had passable fakes. I was not particularly fond of the idea of driving an hour and a half to go clubbing because, for one, I can’t dance and secondly, it would mean buying girls expensive mixed drinks all night. Mob mentality prevailed, however, and I was peer pressured into coming along. I had just got a new car of which I was a bit protective, but I decided to drive so that I could leave at my convenience.

We threw a couple cases in the trunk (for the road and post-last-call). Then, we called up some girls and soon had a caravan of 3 cars and 13 people. About 20 minutes down the road I decided that it would be wise to let my sober friend Marty drive rather than me driving as I was pretty throwed by that time. With Marty at the wheel and me riding shotgun, I pounded beers to the tunes of Sublime as we headed south-bound on I-35.

Everything went well on the trip down aside from having to stop and change a tire for a BMW full of girls at some ghetto truck stop. I changed the tire, drunk and in the cold and rain. Then we were on the road again. The plan was to have my car’s passenger load crash at our friend Gus’s house (who lives in Austin) while the rest of the folks got hotel rooms. Gus is one of our crazier friends who is always excited to see his boys. His fiancée was less enthusiastic at the prospect of a bunch of drunks crashing out at their place, but being the faithful spouse-to-be, she conceded.

At Gus’s we played “drunk jenga” and I got the “exchange clothing” block twice and ended up wearing a skin-tight clubbing shirt of the girl sitting next to me while she wore my frat letters pull-over and my jeans. I couldn’t fit into her clubbing pants so I was in boxers. Needless to say I looked ridiculous. Around 10 we left Gus’s, loaded up in taxis and hit the bars. Not wanting to “club” I opted to hit this cool little Irish pub called Bull McCay’s. Once there I ordered round after round of car bombs, pints of Guinness Stout, Liquid Cocaines and Kamakazis eventually running up a 70 dollar tab on my credit card.

My friends wanted to leave Bull’s and head to the clubs where our female friends were with hopes of scoring some tail (not with our friends but with other girls). So we stumbled down the street to some half-ass club where I attempted to dance with girls before getting bored and settling down at the bar for more mindless drinking. By this time my BAC must have been high enough to use my blood to sterilize surgical instruments. Soon the group left that club to go to another club but I decided to ditch the group, catch a cab back to Gus’s house and drink beers in his hot-tub. I hailed a cab but was unable to give coherent answers to the drivers questions such as “where are you going?” and “what’s the name of the street?” or “look drunk-ass, what side of fucking town is it on?” Abandoned by the taxi-driver I stumbled down the street in the direction of the State Capitol. I think my logic at the time was that if I could get to the capitol, I could get my bearing and make my way to Jester dorm at UT campus. There I knew a girl whom I thought would let me crash with her. Falling on my ass right in front of a club I was pulled to my feet by the bouncer who asked me where I was going. “Home” was the only reply I could muster and tried to walk off. He grabbed me and said, “you aren’t going anywhere kid, where do you live?” Once again I only slurred, “home” and pointed in the direction of the capitol. Not convinced, the bouncer told me to stay put and turned around to converse with another bouncer. I took this as my chance to escape and made a run for freedom.

I didn’t get too far, promptly falling on my ass and banging into a parked car. The bouncers scraped me off the sidewalk and told me not to run away. I was like a wounded animal that had been cornered. In retrospect I’m sure the bouncers were trying to help me, but in my state of mind I was sure there were out to inflict some horrible act upon my person and I would be DAMNED if I was going to let some 6th street bouncers take me down. I approached the bouncer and said “look man, I just want to go home” which I’m sure sounded more like, “looks maans, I juz wanna gu homa.” Before he could reply, I shoved him as hard as I could and ran like I had just robbed a 7/11. I looked behind me and saw the bouncers giving chase. I taunted them with, “you’ll never catch me, I run track mother-fuckers!” as I made a drunken sprint for freedom. Soon the bouncers had given up chase and I ducked into an alley to consider my next move. As I was pondering this, a cop car pulled up to the entrance to the alley and flipped on its lights. I didn’t see a cop get out and I don’t even know if he was there for me or not, but I jumped up and ran. This is the last thing I remember, from this point on it is complete black-out.

When I came to I was curled up in the fetal position in the basement parking garage of a downtown office building. I searched my pockets and found no keys, no wallet and only my cell phone. And my left shoulder was throbbing. I called my friends who came and picked me up. They decided to take me to the hospital in Waco because my arm was hanging grotesquely as if out of socket and there was blood coming out of one of my ears. That and I was mumbling incoherently. At the hospital I was given a MRI and some pain killers. My list of injuries were as follows: one broken clavicle (collar bone), one fractured skull, one concussion, one contusion (bruising of the brain), one ruptured ear drum and one dislocated thumb. The nurses kept asking me what events had transpired to produced such injuries but I honestly couldn’t answer them. One of them told me I smelled like a wino, which I’m sure was true. After one night in the hospital I was released. I missed 2 weeks of class because I was on painkillers 24-7 and my parents made me see a shrink at the advice of the doctor at the hospital. I wore a sling for 2 months. When I did move my left arm I could feel the bones grinding and popping. You would think that after such an experience I would never drink again but you would be wrong.

The sling actually worked quite well for carrying extra beers. In any case, I made a full recovery with no permanent injuries. As for what actually caused my injuries, the only explanation I can come up with stems from a single drunk voice message left on my friend’s phone the night of the incident. In this message I yell frantically that the cops were after me and that I was on top of a building and I had to jump for it to make an escape. It is safe to assume that this alleged jump was enough to put me in the hospital. But I suppose we will never know for sure.