Booze numbs the pain. Until the morning.

Last night I went to a party in a playground near the soccer stadium. The party had a Brazilian theme, which meant we were to drink caipirinhas and mojitos. And we did. We also drank rum and coke, tequila, grappa, and vodka.
There were maybe forty or thirty of us. Including three Brazilians. And everyone looked beautiful, especially the twenty year-old Italian girls with massive breasts who came from God knows where.
We drank and danced and wrestled. We jumped off the swings, we climbed the cargo nets, we ran around like children caught in frenzy of unabashed life lust.
At some point I took my shirt off.
And soon after I gave some Venetian dude a bloody lip. But you know what? He was asking for it. Sure, I got bruised up a bit in the scuffle but at least I didn’t bleed down my chin onto my pretty-boy white button-up.
That’s when the party started dying down. We were out of booze anyway.
Walking my bicycle back through town with some friends I decided it was time to mount that chariot and take to the cobblestone streets like the half-naked drunkard that I was. But my buddy had no bicycle. “No problem,” I said. “We’ll double up.”
And almost immediately after we started rolling, I was on the ground. I couldn’t breathe. And for some reason I couldn’t see. My friends picked me up, I fell down again, they picked me up again.
As they wiped the blood out of my eyes, I could hear my buddy saying he was fine, didn’t get hurt in the crash.
“You went down like a fucking brick,” said one friend.
“How many fingers am I holding up?” said another.
“I can’t see through all this goddamn blood!” I said. “Jesus, I think I cracked a rib.”
“Let’s walk the rest of the way,” said my buddy.
And somehow I woke up in my bed.
Today, I’ve got a really punk-looking gash through my right eyebrow, and I’m damn sure I cracked a rib. For those of you who haven’t had the misfortune of cracking a rib, let me tell you, it’s some of the most painful shit I’ve ever endured. It hurts to sit up, it hurts to breathe. Coughing, even sneezing, is absolutely excruciating. And there’s nothing you can do for it.
The last time I cracked a rib was in Brooklyn a year or two ago. I had gotten into a little tiff with the bouncer at that bar Supreme Trading. Well, I don’t know who swung first but in the end he just sort of picked me up and threw me across the street. I landed on the curb, and cracked my rib.
For weeks I couldn’t fuck in the missionary position. My girlfriend thought I was just lazy.
“Baby, if it didn’t hurt like a stab wound I’d mount you right now,” I’d say. “But it does, so hop on.”


(photo by: Percy Widget)