Ruby Retrospection
There are very little times in which you can walk into a public place covered in blood and no one freaks out. This for some strange reason, was one of those times. You walk up to the bar, motion to your friend’s face, and ask for the keys to the employee bathroom. Once there, he cleans himself up and decides to press on with the night as the the lack of adrenaline and alcohol starts to take over. With your wrist dragging on the ground behind you, and your friends head wrapped in paper towels, you meet the rest of the party at the bar for more drinks. A few more shots down and look at you! You can’t even pick up a shot glass with your right hand and your friend’s blood is thinning by the second, seeping through the paper towels. What a sight this has to be for all the neutrals in the bar.
You sit there, prophesizing the details of what just happened, as if you can remember. As if it didn’t happen quicker than your brain could comprehend, as if you had a doctorate on the topic. Mid tale, a wannabe nurse taps you on the shoulder. Her eyes immediately dart to the bloody rags as all curious nurse’s eyes would.
“Excuse me, hi, uhm, what happened to your friend’s head?”
You tell her the story in layman's terms, as she begins to take a look at the gash. She lets out a motherly gasp and hits you with a very costly prescription for a trip to the ER. Looking down at your hand and then to his head and back to your hand and to the crowd of worried friends and passerby’s and then back to his head, you both decide to be good boys and strap in for the long and sobering walk to the back of the hospital.
Your friend Adam, the “buff and sober type”, accompanies you, laughing at your stupidity, as you fumble down the street; a bloody and broken unit. The last drops of sweat from your surge of adrenaline are lapped away by the early fall breeze and you begin the slow, and painfully natural process of bodily regeneration. The walk is long and excruciating. You check in as the early signs of a hangover begin to take over. Your friend does the smart thing and decides to get attention. You on the other hand, put your wrist away and pretend it’s just a high strain. See, you had spent all of your money on shots that night; you have to keep your priorities straight right? After getting sewn up and checked for a concussion, he was set loose from that hell hole. The ER at 4 a.m. is a ghastly place full of people who have tricked themselves into thinking they’re haunted by demons and gun wounds.
Being against evil doesn't make you good. Tonight I was against it and then I was evil myself. I could feel it coming just like a tide... I just want to destroy them. But when you start taking pleasure in it you are awfully close to the thing you're fighting.
- Ernest Hemingway
You’re thrown out the door of the pizza place turned bar like a football, by a massive bouncer, eventually landing on your wrist as you braced your fall. Your friend Jack, the birthday boy, was pretending to check IDs wasn’t he? You got kicked out but Jack didn’t want to leave, isn’t that right? Things escalated and you ended up making fun of the biggest guy in the bar for “working out just so girls would talk to him” didn’t you? Ah yes, pure class from two fumbling idiots in the street. You move to a different bar while the afore mentioned Adam walks behind you, slowly losing his patience. You set up shop in the back.
Shall we move through the crowd? Let’s move past the bar, past the creeps staring at the girls from across the room, past the girls who are being stared at who are dancing to Mr. Brightside for the fifth time that night (who unfortunately were talking to your sober buff friend who was supposed to act as a body guard against situations just like the one that was about to unfold), past the workers with the towels hanging out of their pants, all the way in the back… ah yes, there you are! Piss drunk and playfully tackling your piss drunk friend in a part of the bar where you’re not allowed to be. It’s his crowning anniversary and you’re supposed to be his eyes and his legs, but it seems like a few too many drinks got in the way of that. One of the towel-totting tough guys hears your unnecessary commotion and comes to clean up.
As he pushes you backwards up a small set of stairs, out of the restricted area and into a crowd of Croakie wearing ex-lacrosse and hockey players, he takes your friend by the collar and unleashes a heavy workingman’s warning. It was a little too intense for your liking, and a little too full of malicious intent for your current state of expert detection skills. Here, is where we arrive at the moment. The moment where your brain decided to take a screenshot for the fear that the live feed would be ending soon. (You don’t know this yet, but it will be ending shortly. It ended before you could fully take in the beauty of it, and it’s a damn shame too – what an entertaining memory clip it would have been.)
Your brain sparks and sends your already cracked wrist hurdling to the unexpected face of the man with his hands on your friend’s collar. Your wrist shatters and the Croakies swarm like mosquitoes. Glass breaks on the floor, and dinner bells ring. The crowd shifts away and give the beasts some space to feed. You fall immediately almost as if you paused the game, went home, slid on some greased up roller blades, bladed back to the bar and resumed play. A few forearms in the face and some ripped shirts later and you and your friend, who twenty-one years ago was coming into this world for the first time, freshly jellied and screaming pink, are tossed out the back like a cliché scene from a western saloon scuffle.
A good ass kicking is one hell of a sobering experience. Once outside, your lungs expand and the crispness of the night air explodes into them. Oxygen is a beautiful change of pace from the axe spray and sweat concoction you had previously been subjected to. Now, nice and drunkenly sober, you stand outside the back of the bar and survey the land for your friend. You spot him immediately. He spews slander at the bouncer who kicked him out, attempting to go back in and rehash old quarrels. It takes you a minute, but you soon realize the dark side of his face is covered in blood, almost as if he stopped half way while painting his face for a Two Face costume. The source of the leakage was a sufficient gash just above his right eyebrow. It looked worse than you suspected it of actually being, so you decided to drag him next door to your place of work; another bar with a much friendlier atmosphere.
As you trek home from the ER, you go your separate ways, slide into your respective beds, and pass out, desperately trying to pretend nothing out of the ordinary had happened. The morning after, however, was the time for reckoning. It was a promise to get even for the neglect of your body. There’s truly nothing like a few expensive trips to a wrist doctor and a few years of physical therapy to make you realize that you’re a dumbass, and you just might deserve the slow climb back to the top. Your blood deserves its place on the inside and the world deserves less chaos. Even villains qualify for basic health care.