brokeface

it was two days ago, tuesday afternoon and i was having drinks with my art friend chris. shot and a beer for $5, and we were throwing them back fast. chris has been my best art friend since the beginning. a very crazy character to say the least, his lifestyle makes mine look like an accountants. he was having a helluva tough day as he was coming down from the acid he took the previous night. we talked about the things that we normally talked about over several drinks:work, art, and girls.

we end up making our way over to my girlfriend's apartment to meet up with her and one of her friends and continue having drinks and conversation. nothing out of the ordinary. chris has always tends to be a bit of a belligerent drunk, he has told me on several occasions that his own family has held several interventions for him, obviously to no avail.

out of no where, he starts play jabbing me, which is nothing out of the ordinary, but the next thing i know he gets me in a clinch behind my head and throws a knee at my face. my vision explodes in a flash of white and it feels like my right eyeball explodes. i drop to my knees and clutch my face in pain, tears welling up.

"what the fuck man."

"oh shit sorry dude."

"fuck"

"shit, i'm sorry man, you alright?"

"no fuck, you just kneed me in the fucking face."

i try to open my eyes, but everything is a blur. coupled with the vision loss is probably a minor concussion, but i am too drunk myself at this point to notice. he apologizes like mad, but i just tell him to forget about it and leave. my girlfriend is in a little bit of a frenzy and keeps wanting me to go to the hospital, but i reassure her that nothing seems to be broken and that i'll just wake up tomorrow morning with raccoon eyes.

i wake up in the morning with no black eye, but have a slight double vision, and a pounding headache. everytime i hack/cough up, there is blood in my mucus. i am not happy. i reassure myself and my girlfriend that i'm okay, but we both can tell the hesitancy in my voice. i drop her off at school and drive myself back home, feeling a bit nauseated. i call my primary doctor, but he isn't in. the receptionist says that she'll page him with my number.

i take a nap and wake up sometime in the early afternoon feeling a bit better. my only major concern is my vision, but that seems to be fine, it just feels like my eyeball has been hit with a hammer. my doctor finally calls back at some time around 4 and i explain the situation to him and he says that i should immediately go to the ER, one of my least favorite places in the world.

now don't get me wrong, i have always lived by the motto that boys will be boys, but i have never inflicted pain on someone who doesn't deserve it, especially my friends.

long story short, the doctor gives me a CAT scan and says that i fractured my right orbital socket. upon looking at the scan, he also tells me that the left side has also been fractured before and that my nose looks like it has been broken a couple of times, but there's nothing we can do about that now. i wait several hours for two more specialists to come in and look things over. they say what the first doctor says. i am not happy.

i sitting at the computer now after taking my fifth percocet of the day, and still hacking a bit of blood from my busted ass sinuses. i am not happy. i keep thinking about why chris would do something like that. it's not like i haven't told him on several occasions that friends don't fight friends, but the messages seemed to have been lost on him, just like his families interventions.

i have known him for quite some time. i consider him a friend, but do not see how things can ever be the same after something like this. maybe no matter how much of a friend you are to someone and how much you try to help, there is just no getting through to them, unless they want to help themselves.