The Christmas Chronicles pt.2: Amateur rhinoplasty in the house of the cradle robber

I used to be a raging alcoholic. I'm not advocating it, glorifying it, or otherwise. But i'm not denying. You know that terrible song about how "everybody's working for the weekend"? Well, I guess I was just waiting out the week to end it with an asinine display of equal parts inability to hold ones liquor and an inability to consume that much liquor. And you know, I just didn't make the greatest decisions when I was drunk. And for the most part, I did what anyone put me up to when I was intoxicated. Which is how i ended up nursing a broken nose during the holiday season of 1995.

I was invited to my friend Phil's girlfriends house to drink and watch some movies. I forget the girlfriends name, but I know she was significantly older than Phil, or Chris. Or any of the teenagers she had milling around her apartment. She was 16 years Phil's senior, which in high school seems like the thing you'd want to have happen to you. When you're younger you think older people read the Kama Sutra and have "skills" and nothing seems more edgy than hooking up with your own Mrs. Robinson. Which as you get older, just seems like a feminized version of the guy that hangs out with teens just to mentally block the aging process. I knew a guy like that by the way. His name was Ed. He had the biggest set of breasts I'd ever seen on a man, and he went on to take too much LSD, then proceed to drop trou and run down Stewart Avenue naked till he was eventually put in a mental ward that looked like something Chuck Norris would have, no COULD have, broken out of.

Anyways, we're at the cradle robbing girlfriends house drinking when one of my friends, leans over and whispers into my ear that I should pour salad dressing over my best friend Chris' head. Chris used to be an gold medal winning alcoholic himself, long after I had quit, he continued the good fight. But Chris, much like the Wu-Tang Clan, wasn't nothing to fuck with. I never fucked with the Wu-Tang, but I failed to see a reason why my best friend status wouldn't ensure that I'd walk away from antagonizing Chris with little more than punch in the arm, or something similar. And never wanting to deprive my friends of a laugh, I walked over to the cradle robbers fridge and withdrew a bottle of salad dressing that could only be purchased at Costco, economy sized it was.

I walk behind Chris, lift the bottle over his head and squeeze as hard as I can, but only after I had removed the lid to ensure that the dressing poured all over his head. Chris was one of those guys that wore tennis visors tilted sideways, got tribal tattoos, liked 311. Chinese arithmetic and NASA combined could not formulate how Chris and I became, or remained friends, even to this day. And I guess I counted on that friendship to rear its head and save me from a respectable uppercut. Chris was wearing "fresh new gear" and the salad dressing "ruined his chances with the honnies" that night, so he said. They say that as the salad dressing made its way down his face, the dressing began to fill in the creases in his forehead, indicating he was leaving civil on a shuttle bus to incensed. Chris, now unrecognizable under a mask of Thousand Island dressing, gets up and turns to look at me.

I can't say a good portion of life's firsts are pleasurable. Drivers test, dentists office visit, open wound that needed to be sewn shut, sex. I can't say I enjoyed any of them the first time around. And getting my first uppercut for Christmas was certainly no different. Chris stood looking at me, shrinking in size as his muscles tightened, he stooped over and he slowly released his inner Hulk. I tried to offer him an apology but before I could get it out I was sent stumbling into the Cradle Robber's Christmas tree, breaking a host of gifts and ornaments underneath my weight. You know how in the old country and western movies when a guy punches another guy in the face, the guy getting punched flies back. Well, I didn't fly, but it lifted me off my feet.

He broke my nose. He sure did. The next day my eyes were blackened and the nose was swollen. My girlfriend, a part Creole transplant from Lafayette, LA who loved Sonic Youth, offered only "Who fucked you up" by way of consolation. I didn't appreciate that. And I swore I'd never talk to Chris again. It was 2 weeks after I had been punched when Chris called me to first apologize, which I thought was nice, only then to ask me how hard the punch was, rated on a scale between 1 and 10. I'm not even lying.

So my nose was broken, by my best friend no less. But i'm ok with that. Some people think broken noses are rugged looking and manly. I can assure you, it just makes me look like I had my nose broken. And did the wrong thing to a guy with an impressive uppercut. The moral? I guess it would be not to put anything past your best friend, do your best to not enrage an alcoholic and if you can't avoid taking an upper cut dont let your newly unconscious body land in a statutory rapists Christmas tree.

Merry Christmas, your buddy Luke