Sunday, April 29, 2007

So there we were last Friday...

...me and two of my younger cousins, in a bar in downtown Madison, at about 1:30am. Mad-town is a big college town, of course, and the bar's patrons were mostly of the undergrad demographic, meaning my 29 years and my early stage male pattern baldness - not to mention my wedding ring - likely identified me as an outsider. But my spirits were boosted by my cousins' company, and by at least a half dozen Lienekugel Reds. So when cousin Jen asked if I wanted to check out the bar's crowded, sweaty dance floor in the basement, I was all for it.

There was a bit of a line to deal with on the way down the stairs, and when I noticed that the young lady in front of me looked like a fresher Lara Flynn Boyle, I tapped her on the shoulder and mentioned the resemblance. "Lara who?" she responded.

"She's a big star," I said. "You know - Twin Peaks? The Practice? Jack Nicholson's one-time girlfriend?" The lady in front of me was either too young to know Lara or too appalled to humor me, and either way I was quickly beginning to feel like an old dirtbag. Luckily, as the line moved forward, she turned away to interface with a bouncer, sparing me further awkwardness - at least for the moment.

Flash forward roughly cinco minutos. My cousins and I were now on the dance floor, and it was a crowded, sweaty, basement number indeed. I felt a little nostalgia as the place reminded me of similar venues I often frequented in my college years, back in the previous century. A pleasantly bouncy hip-hop song was blaring through the speakers, and I amused my cousins by putting a hand in the air and affecting an exaggerated white man's underbite. Just then, the DJ took to the mic to make an important announcement. "Hey party people - last call for the basement bar!"

Apparently my old college drinkin' instincts hadn't completely faded, because almost reflexively I told the cousins that I'd grab us each another beer, and then I turned to the bar and signaled for three plastic bottles of Miller Lite. I'm a Bud Light man through and through, of course, but Wisconsin is Miller territory, and you know what they say about "when in Rome."

Anyway, after paying the barkeep, I grabbed the beers by the necks, two bottles in my left hand and the third bottle in my right. I wheeled back to the dance floor, quickly scanned for my cousins, and saw them on the other side of the room. That same happy hip-hop tune was still bumping away, and I'm not one to let a good beat go to waste, so I decided to spice up the walk over by hoisting the beers up in the air and putting an appropo bounce in my step.

With the plastic beer bottles in my hands and my hands in the air, I took a big first step away from the bar, toward my cousins, and past a girl who was dancing drunkely nearby. Unfortunately for me, the dance floor was a marble one. Marble is slick to begin with - and with a full Friday night's worth of spilled drinks puddled on it, this particular stretch of marble was sporting a coefficient of friction of close to zero.

The next thing I knew, my front foot went out from under me and I executed a textbook faceplant. Both of my hands were raised and occupied with beer bottles, so my left cheek was the first part of me to reach floor level and therefore absorb the brunt of my fall. My left hand was next to touch down, and the impact caused both of its beers to rocket away from me at diagonal angles across the wet ground.

The crash stunned me, and for a few short seconds my actions were guided by another instinct - the one that compels you, after a moment of extreme embarassment, to play things off and hope that nobody had seen. I sprang back up from the ground, and ascertaining that the beer in my right hand was not lost, I took a swig. The bass was still booming, and I did a couple knee bends, feeling for the beat.

For a moment, it was almost as if nothing had happened, but in seconds the shock cleared and I realized that I had just taken a hard fall, on my face, in a dark room, in the company of two cousins and a basement full of dancing drunks. Nearly simultaneously, I became all too aware of sharp stinging pains both under and above my left eye.

As I put my free hand to my eye, I realized that the girl dancing nearby had turned toward me and begun to move in synch with my half-hearted gyrations. Apparently interpreting the whole thing as an elaborate dance move, she mirrored my hand-to-eye movement, put her other fist in the air, and then proceeded to rotate 180 degrees and dance off in the other direction.

My cousins had witnessed everything from their end of the room and quickly rushed to my side. "What the hell was that?" Jen asked with a laugh. "I think I just wiped out," I said. When I took my hand away from my eye, I recognized the dark outline of blood on my palm, and then looked up at Jen and Aaron. I'm not sure if their mouths actually said "Holy shit!" but the looks they were giving me certainly did.

"You're bleeding!" Jen and Aaron yelled. "I know," I answered. "And I dropped both of your beers."

A few minutes later, the three of us were sitting at a table upstairs, waiting for the bar to empty out so we could leave. As I wallowed in pained self-pity and dabbed a wad of napkins to the cuts above and below my left eye, I looked across the room and happened to make brief eye contact with the Lara Flynn Boyle lookalike. She nudged the young lady next to her, pointed at me, and said something they both snickered at before turning around.

"There's probably a lesson here somewhere for me - or for all of us." I said to my cousins, in a meager attempt to find a positive side to the episode.

"Don't drip on your shirt," Jen said.

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