my weekend was muy unbelievable, and exciting to boot. but remember, within all true excitement lies heart-jarring terror.
scene- friday afternoon. got up @12:15. walked to borders to buy a copy of radiohead’s kid a. how little did i comprehend the nebulous hand of circumstance. flash forward 12 hours. I was at a party thrown by my friends chang, Jason, and Matt, at their newish west philly pad. they have the upper two of four floors.
chang is a mocha mixture of thai, jamaican, irish, and native american. matt looks like screech’s older, smoother brother; imagine the halfway genotype of dustin diamond and michael diamond. jason, on the other hand, is all sly lithe feline angles. they all seemed to enjoy the party they were throwing.
all was going well. mmuch drank had been drunk. a crazy crackhead woman had snuck in and was entertaining all. for the most part, an enjoyable evening. suddenly, a call rang out. “Somebody call 911! Fucking call 911, hurry!”
Jason and another friend brent decide to go onto the roof. it is easily accessible from chang’s back window. jason was the drunkest anyone’s ever seen 'im. brent, pretty much back off the wagon (but never really on, had just getting been his wind again), is drunk too, but in that inscrutable way good drinkers get. on the ledge and hanging onto a gutter pipe, jason projects a big bolus of beer spewing about. he wipes his mouth, and continues his ascent outward and upward.
the crackhead has an enourmous amount of confidence, the kind you only get from distrusting the air you breathe, let alone others around you. her bragadoccio expressed itself as a front of intense intimacy with those not in the room. Soon before the Incident she starts asking around, “Where’s Jason? Have you seen jason?” Oddestly, her anxiety was palpable, but sadly hollow.
it’s been chilly here in philly. finger-clenchingly and face-achingly cold. high up on the fourth-story roof, the wind must have been whipping around the limbs of the two like an evil icy tongue, but they were drunk enough that it could be ignored.
substances to be used or abused are fascinating when looked at in the right frame. much like new situations or familiar friends, they cause emergent aspects of the self to manifest. you are, oftentimes, a fundamentally different person depending on what you’re on. as I’m sure you all know very well, alcohol summons the dionysian dimensions from the depth of the self. the imp, the loki, the flute-playing pan.
with this in mind, think of our protagonists on the roof. only then will their decision to jump from roof to roof make any sense to you (if it could at all). where you will find no sense and a complete absence of order is in what happened next.
after the second or third round of jumping back and forth between the gap of the house and adjoining, jason lost his footing, and vanished from sight. but not from brent’s.
that’s because brent dove after him, trying to catch a flap of jacket or bunch of fingers. it took them both less than a second to hit the ground.
jason smashed onto a window on the way down, laying open the flesh of his face. he landed on his feet, popping the left femur our of it’s ball-and-socket joint. the force of landing continued to move it’s way through his body, compressing vertebrae until breakage occured. as his body crumpledinto a smashed heap in the alley between the houses, his face smashed hard into the concrete. various and sundry sinuses were smashed.
brent landed shortly thereafter.
as people gathered downstairs panicked and frantic, the ambulence started on its way. the tableau in the alleyway was pure Pieta, with brent cradling the broken form of jason. his blood seeped onto brent’s pants, staining the left leg. some were silent, some were screaming. all were in some type of shock.
within five minutes of the first call, an ambulance arrived at the disaster scene. jason was strapped to a stretcher and checked for vitals and stabilized. brent was walking around in total sleepwalking shock. his whole body trembled. the only injuries visible were scrapes and abrasions on his arm, which he had dragged against the outside wall in an effort to slow down. he was dead sober now, and decided he’d better get himself looked at too.
a commotion brewed by the front of the house. our neighborhood visitor was walking down the steps with a bottle of port in her arms. she starts yeling at people, hysterically hepped up on adrenaline. the shock is wearing off on everyone, mainly because of the crackhead’s caterwauling. there is again a hum of conversation.
the now jason-laden ambulence pulled away. I accompanied brent to the hospital in the back of a police car. we got dropped off at the hospital, where I stayed till 5:00am, brent 8:00.
and that was just friday…