Friday night was a dozy. Thanks goes out to the middle-aged black couple that live below a friend. Despite sharing not only an apartment building, but a wall/ceiling they still have never met. I got to know them too well, I won’t go into the chess-playing, blinko-drinking game details (and there’s plenty more not fit to post), but there’s a good chance you can piece together the events of the night from the 6 a.m. text. Sorry. I’m really trying to cut down on those.
So I battled Saturday in bad shape but sober, more or less, after a day of recovery. With a crisp feeling in the air and priorities fast approaching, generosity was the mood of the evening as the first two parties we hit up served free booze. Figures.
Drinking would have helped cope with the OSU annoyances in my neighborhood that come after such a lopsided and truly horrendous loss (it will be a long while before OSU football is taken seriously again on a national level), but I’m glad I was sober: If not I might have killed him.
About 10 of us ride to our next party and a drunk in a cab behind us starts shouting anti-bike epithets. Pulling a move I have tried a hundred times, one friend circles back telling the down-and-out Buckeye to get out of the car if he’s going to talk shit. When confronted, they never man up, even if they have the numbers in a car full of buddies. For some reason this guy wouldn’t back down … well, until it was out of his control.
There’s noting more attractive than a drunk bike-loving girlfriend take on a Neanderthal. She got in his face, pushed him around and gave him plenty of shit talk repercussion. The rest of us come back to see what’s going on, and we’re still in a decent mood, amused at the scene. We tell the drunk to get back in his cab, but he wanted any type of piece he could get from any of us.
First he was sexist, then homophobic, missed a few punches he wildly threw, said some intentionally inflammatory remarks … and we kept giving him the chance to get back in the cab.
Eventually I pushed him down and he got up ready for more. A left to the temple knocked him down again and almost into the path of a speeding motorist. A scared friend jumps out of the cab which immediately takes off. By now we have a group of sightseers waiting for the knockout blow, thirsty for the type of violence that promises to satisfy after a night of heavy binge drinking because you were let down by the most important thing in your simple collegiate life.
Still not backing down, the dude gets in the face of our toughest who delivers a direct shot to the jaw. I didn’t see it, but I’ve heard the shatter of a jaw before and this was much louder. In freefall the drunk goes limp, falls to the ground, bounces his head off the sidewalk. His friend, who came out from hiding, can’t seem to revive him.
A car of onlookers pulled over to the side of the road cheer triumphantly a collective approval straight from the Coliseum. If theses depraved drunks, many in worse shape than the guy who just got knocked out, could see this spectacle every Saturday night instead of a victory on the football field they just might take it.
Like everyone else around, before they have time to let the past minute sink in, it’s time to leave in a hurry.
