“Blood on the rocks,
Blood on the streets,
Blood in the sky,
Blood on the sheets.
If you want blood,
you got it”
- AC/DC If You Want Blood (You Got It)
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but a lot of weird stuff happens to me. Some of it I bring on myself, and the rest of it just goes with the territory of being awesome I suppose. There’s a price to be paid for sheer-badassery and sometimes it’s paid with blood.
All of us Wharf Rats were gathered at Fontaine’s for our weekly meeting. The $2 Stetson beer was flowing like water and the shots of Goldschlager were on their way. Wiley and I shot ours back and a bit dribbled out onto my hand. I wandered to the restroom to wash my hands and that was fairly successful. It was when I tried to dry them that the evening went horribly awry.
Fontaine’s has a smallish men’s restroom. It’s basically a sink, a urinal, and a crapper. There’s a small metal divider between the sink and the urinal, you know, to keep splash-back to a minimum. This divider ends about 3 inches or so below my eye-level. After I washed my hands, I turned around to grab some paper towels to dry them and as I whirled back around to throw the towels away, I sneezed. It was a fairly hard sneeze and as I brought my head down to meet my hand to cover the sneeze, I slammed my forehead into the top corner of that metal divider. I’ve got a notoriously hard head, but even so, I saw stars for a second or two. I raised my head back up and started to walk out the door when I glanced in the mirror.
“Holeee Lord! I look like Harry Freakin’ Potter!” I exclaimed, as a stream of blood ran down the bridge of my nose. “I’ve been in the bathroom 30 F’n seconds and I’ve managed to split my head open!” I grabbed some more paper towels, wet them down and put them on my bleeding forehead and walked back to the bar to take my lumps.
Roman was the first to notice. “Good God! What the hell did you do?” He said. So I went through the whole story in all its faded glory. We took some action shots (which I’m still waiting for Jenn to upload), had a few good laughs, and went back to our drinking.
After a few minutes Wiley spoke up, “You know, you might wanna come up with a little better story than ‘I hit my head in the bathroom at the bar.’” And thus the brain storming began…
We went through all the typical ideas, like barfights and the like. Barfights are so cliche and everyone knows I don’t get involved in that nonsense anyway. I’m a minor celebrity and as such, I have henchmen that take care of these things. After discarding a few ideas, it occurred to me that the new Harry Potter film was about to come out and I had just conveniently scarred myself in much the same manner. Since magic is more or less not real, I couldn’t easily say some snake-faced dark lord had scarred my forehead with his deathstick. I did need some street cred with the Potter heads so I decided that my wound just appeared, like the Stigmata. If I parlay this properly, perhaps I can convince some of those little bastards that I’m the second coming of Harry J. Potter. They’re mostly youngans and their parents are those gullible “I’m not religious, but I’m spritual” types with deep pockets who would totally spring for this sort of new age idea. After all, people buy into this crap.
All in all, a pretty interesting evening. Another good story to tell an as Roman so eloquently phrased it, “There’s good stories and then there’s shame.” Fortunately, I ran out of the latter years ago.
