It’s about one in the morning on June 6, 2013. I’m lying on the ground after taking quite the shitfaced tumble down some concrete steps outside my favorite bar in Blacksburg. The back of my head is oozing blood and I haven’t eaten a meal since about noon the day before yet I’ve been pounding vodka-sodas, Rumple Minze, Jameson, the finest rail tequila, and who knows, I may have even had a beer or two. Not really my style but I’m wasted so who knows for sure.
See I had just gotten back down south after a week at home in Jersey. I saw my family and I’d tended bar for said week to make a little extra scratch before going back to the Burg where I was a full-time student, with a full-time job managing other college students in a pizzeria whilst also chasing my dreams as a filmmaker and producing short films for my major.
Now because I had all this cash on me from tips made back up north, I was buying drinks for everybody all night and having an awesome time. In fact, I’m pretty sure at one point I got up on the karaoke stage, without being invited, and tried to sing a duet of “A Little Less Conversation” by Elvis. And I’m pretty sure the person I sang with absolutely hates me for it because I sucked.
But now here I am, lying on the ground, surrounded by people and EMTs, with a hole in my head and a flashlight shining in my eyes.
“Do you know your name?” An EMT asked.
“Matt.”
“Alright Matt, what’s in a vodka-Red Bull?”
“Umm vodka. And Red Bull?
“Good, good. Do you know what day it is?”
“Is it after midnight?”
“Sure is.”
“Then it’s June 6th, 2013!”
The surrounding crowd ripped into applause and started celebrating as the EMTs pulled a stretcher out of the ambulance that was standing by. They put me on the stretcher despite my pleas not to because I knew I couldn’t afford a visit to the hospital or even just the ambulance ride over. I was already working full-time to make my rent and bills, and this was going to absolutely crush my wallet.
We get to the hospital and since I’m drunk, have a literal splitting headache and I really don’t want to be there, I cop an attitude with the hospital staff. And despite my pleas not to, these motherfuckers hold me down, take my wallet to get my information, staple the wound in my head shut, and then run me for a CT scan to see if I had a concussion.
I’m not a doctor, but I played sports most of my life and I didn’t need any tests to tell me what I already knew which is that I most certainly had a concussion. I’ve had them before and I know what they feel like. But having said that, the staffers tested me and then told me to lie down in a bed in a dark room and go to sleep.
At the time I was under the impression that going to sleep with a concussion was a big no-no, which I later discovered is not the truth but it scared me to do so on this particular night with that piece of knowledge lacking in my memory warehouse. So naturally, my attitude with the staffers persisted. The guy at the front desk denied my requests for coffee. He was an older guy, late 40s, early 50s with glasses, a goatee and the salt and pepper type hair wearing Grateful Dead scrubs and right now he hated my guts. But that was okay because he was kind of a dick and I hated his miserable ass too. Albeit given his age and the fact that he was working the graveyard shift in a Lewis Gale Memorial Hospital in Montgomery County, Virginia, yeah I’d be pretty fucking miserable too.
I begin to do anything I can not to fall asleep, which isn’t too difficult given the fact that my adrenaline is somewhat pumping and my head is pounding. But I’m pacing around the room, playing games on my phone until it dies, and persistently asking hospital employees if I can have a cup of coffee.
Finally at about 4:15 a male nurse comes into my room and asks me how I’m doing. I tell him that I’m holding up through the pain and that I would absolutely love a cup of coffee. He tells me that they won’t give me any pain-meds because I seem wired, but that since I’ve been “pretty cooperative” thus far, he’ll bring me some coffee at five (because that makes sense since I’m “so wired”).
However, I continue pacing around the room and this rubs the clown in the Grateful Dead scrubs the wrong way so he walks into the room and we have it out, verbally.
“Get back in the bed now!” He orders me.
“No. I’m not getting in the bed, I don’t want to fall asleep.”
“If you don’t get back in the goddamn bed, I’m calling the goddamn cops!”
“Fine. Fuckin’ call ’em.”
He turns around and leaves the room en route to call the cops, and I run out of the room and in the opposite direction. He notices this as he gets to the phone and looks to the security guard patrolling the emergency room, “aw shit. GET HIM!” He tells security.
I’m sprinting down the hallway and when I turn the corner I realize not only are there now a security guard and two male nurses chasing me, but I’m running in the wrong direction. I get to the end of the corridor where I can either go through some swinging doors or turn around, so I stop full-speed on a dime and change directions. One of the male nurses is there to try and tackle me so I flip him over my shoulders, the other male nurse attempts to do the same and I give him a swim move, which was later interpreted as an attempted clothesline I think because these fools felt embarrassed that an out-of-shape-drunk fuck evaded their tackles. The security guard gets in my way and I break through his tackle and head for the doors. I hit the exit button and burst through the emergency room doors into the waiting room and out the automatic doors to the parking lot.
It’s pouring rain and the male nurse I pulled the swim move on is right on my heels (come to find out later on this night, that this guy runs triathlons). I’m running through the parking lot and he comes up beside me and asks “so do you work out?”
Now I don’t know if I said this, but I’m pretty sure I said this; “no, I smoke weed motherfucker.”
And he says “this won’t last long.”
Sure enough, I wind up boxing myself into a section of the parking lot where the only way out is over a 20 foot brick wall and then a 10-15 foot fence on top of that. I’m gassed by now and the male nurse grabs me by the arm as I huff out the words “dahh, you got me.”
“You know what sucks?” He asks.
“What?”
“Now ya gotta go to jail.”
“What?! For that?!?!”
“Oh yeah.”
A police officer speeds into the parking lot, jumps out of his vehicle, takes my arm from the nurse, slams me down on the ground (real smart, because it’s not like I’ve already got a head injury or anything), cuffs me and picks me up off the ground. The drawstring in my gym shorts had been missing for quite a few months by now so my shorts fall down around my ankles and Officer Slapnuts drags me back into the hospital in my underoos.
He isolates me in a room while he takes down hospital staffers’ accounts of what just transpired. I sat there thinking to myself “welp, this definitely isn’t going to go my way or be entirely accurate.”
Slapnuts comes back to the room and grabs me to escort me to his car awaiting in the parking lot. He throws me into the back and we skedaddle in the rain to county jail. I’m reflecting on the night and the things going through my head at that very moment are: “My family is about to disown me, so I probably just won’t tell them about this particular mishap…I have a near perfect ass, I’m gonna be a big hit in prison. I’m not gonna like prison very much.”
Stay tuned for Part 2: The Aftermath of this story coming next week. Also, stay up on The Imaginary Humans Podcast to hear more “neat stories” like this.
And be sure to follow @Imginary_Humans for fun polls on twitter.
The rest of this trilogy is below. Read it wisely, unlike its main character…
Hell of a Night (Part II: The Aftermath)
Hell of a Night (Part III: Court)
MattyMouthsOff 
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