In the care of friends

It was a very warm and extremely dark night in Glenwood Springs Colorado. I had not seen any action at the bar, and my karaoke exploits had left me unfulfilled. As I entered the car and started the ignition Jim Croce sang “Operator” from the CD that I had in the stereo. I knew when I got to the bar that I was driving, so I intentionally avoided drinking anything alcoholic because the road to my friends’ house was particularly dangerous.
My sobriety, however, did not assist in my ability to make good decisions. When the speed limit is posted as 20 mph, 60 is not an acceptable substitute. As I came to the corner where my vehicle met its end, I failed to realize my error in time. I tried to make the turn, but was met by loose gravel on the road. The car drifted sideways. I was literally standing on the brakes. Seeing that this was not going to work, I suddenly realized that my Saturn was front wheel drive. I released the brake and jammed the gas pedal as far down as I could. The engine revved, and for just a moment, the front wheels caught and began pulling me out of the slide. But as luck would have it, the passenger side tire found more gravel and off the cliff I went. Suddenly I knew why I should have bought the maxi-model (with wings), but alas I had not. As the vehicle leaped twenty-five feet to the right of the road and proceeded to fall twenty-five feet below the road, I screamed. But everything happened in slow motion. My scream died out, I looked at my watch, wrote a will and knitted a sweater. I actually began to get impatient wondering when I would hit the ground.
Finally, there it was. In the darkness I could feel pain in my back, my right shoulder and my head. I realized that I was sitting in the passenger seat of the car with my back to the door. I looked behind me and found that I had put my head through the door’s window. Then as I looked to the right I found that the passenger air bag was responsible for the pain in my shoulder, and that there was a hole in the collapsed windshield that was eerily shaped like my head. I climbed across the vehicle and kicked open the drive side door. As I leaned out I could feel warmth all along my face on the right side. I knew that I was bleeding, and all I could think about was how dark it was and how high up in bear and mountain lion country that I was. I climbed the twenty-five foot cliff back to the road and took off my shirt to apply pressure to my cut head. Then I started walking. I walked about three quarters of a mile, talking out loud to warn off wildlife that could undoubtedly smell me, before a car came along. I must have looked like something out of a bad Halloween dream in the dark like that, covered in blood, but they stopped anyway.
When the kind people dropped me off at Scott’s house, I slowly made my way inside. I caught my reflection in a window on the way in and jumped when I saw that I had an almost perfect line down the middle of my face. On the right blood streaked everywhere, on the left, nothing at all. When I walked in Scott’s house, I was angled so that he could not see the blood. “I hate to be a pain, but could someone drive me to the hospital?”
“Why do you need to go to the hospital…” I turned to face Scott as he asked, and without pause he leaped to his feet and continued, “okay, we’ll go right now!”
At the hospital, I was subject to the sadistic personalities of two graveyard shift nurses who wanted to pick the glass from my scalp, and one radiologist who wanted me to hold fifty pound weights in my right hand so that if there wasn’t a separation, they could be sure to create one. Once back in the exam room, the doctor came in with the x-rays. With the doctor on my left and Scott on my right, we looked at an obvious separation between my right collar bone and right shoulder.
“Does your shoulder hurt?” Scott asked sincerely.
“Yeah, it really does…” I began without looking away from the film, “it is throb-“ I was cut short by a sudden excruciating pain in my right shoulder.
“WELL GET IT FIXED!” Scott said while turning and slapping me directly in the injured area. I fell to the ground, tears streaming down my face cutting through the still caked blood…laughing to the point that I couldn’t breath! Meanwhile, the doctor is looking at Scott as if he were going to hit him as well.
Finally, back at Scott’s house I was able to wash my head and lay down to rest. Just as I was about to fall asleep on the couch, Scott turned on Sports Center where they were recapping today’s greatest putts. Someone made a fifty foot putt, and Scott yelled, “INTO THE CLOWNS MOUTH!” I laughed until I lost consciousness begging the whole time for him to stop talking!