A spot of the old ultra-violence...

From: misc061@csc.somewhere.ac.nz
Subject: A spot of the old ultra-violence...
Date: 16 Sep 94 23:14:17 +1200
Lines: 114

A spot of the old ultra-violence
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Last weekend I lost and maimed a friend--but that's OK, because I learnt a moronic beer trick in the process. It's the kind of thing that you see oily twentysomething boys doing in cheap night clubs while they work on their nascent beer-guts. Lots of fun.

What you do is this: grasp your stubbie (Australasian for 12oz beer bottle) firmly by the middle, wait until your friend is deeply in the midst of a pick-up speech (this is an important point of etiquette), listen for some particularly witty line (that is, wait until the pompous git squeezes out something that obviously needs deflation), and smack the top of his stubbie, hard, with the bottom of yours. This should be done with a minimum of arm movement and a blank lookon the face; ideally the woman shouldn't notice. Your victim's beer will "cum" vigorously all over his delicate proceedings. Repeat often during larger promotions.

The best way to save face when this happens to you is to jam the bottle firmly in your mouth, suck hard, and hope your eyes stay in your head. This is especially effective if you can keep a straight face while sinking vast quantities of warm, foamy beer, but does tend to come unstuck a little if you blow chunks all over the person you're trying to pick up.

John, the friend I mentioned at the beginning, taught me this in a bar. It was near the end of the night... we (John, me and a few friends) had been drinking for eight hours. Our faces were red and glistening with sweat, we were talking too loud and had somehow formed the idea that we were the funniest people on the planet. We had been smacking each others beers incessantly, so our shirt fronts, and the surrounding floor, were soaked. The bouncers had started to edge closer, trying to pick the delicate point at which we would be costing them more than they were making out of us--or maybe they just wanted to pound seven shades of shit out of us. One of them looked pretty excited; had a hard-on, even.

Being a keen spotter, and veteran cause, of the sort of bad craziness that involves large quantities of alcohol and huge bouncers, I went to negotiate peace with the doormen. As I'm a spotty little gimp, my usual negotiation technique involves lying on my back and pissing
myself like a crippled dog. However, eight hours of drinking will bestow a little courage on even the lowliest little shit, and so I begged time for another round. Regrettably.

By this stage of the evening we had given up all pretensions to normal drinking etiquette (no pointing, no showing of teeth, no use of consonants... that sort of pratty crap) and had started to lunge and flail wildly whenever we saw an unprotected bottle. John barely got his last beer off the bar before I hit it. He was expecting this, though, and immediately stuffed the stubbie in his mouth. Fair rammed it home, he did. Which was unfortunate, because the top had busted
off.

His eyes went wide as the glass slit through his top and bottom lip, and sank into his tongue. He fell to his knees, trying to hold the bottle still, but the foaming beer forced its way into his wind-pipe and he coughed explosively, spraying us with a fine mist of blood. He dropped the bottle and clamped his hands to his mouth, letting out a loud, low wail. The whole bar went silent. Even the arsehole bouncers were staring white faced at the mess. He was bleeding rivers. In about fifteen seconds his hands had been covered in slick red gloves, and the front of his shirt, once a cheerful shade of larger, had turned a violent crimson. He just knelt there, staring at me with enormous yellow eyes, making pathetic mewling noises and letting out small coughs whenever blood ran down the back of his throat. Blood was dripping off his elbows.

Two of us picked him up and hauled him out the door, pulled him into the back seat of his car and drove to Accident and Emergency. On the way there he went into deep shock. The bits of his face that weren't dark red were white. His fingernails were showing dark blue through
the coagulating blood, he was shivering uncontrollably. By the time we got to the hospital he couldn't walk, so we carried him inside.

Saturday night in A&E is one of New Zealand's national institutions; drinking and fighting is one of our national sports. When you walk through the doors of a hospital's emergency department in the weekend you're greeted by the smell of freshly processed alcohol; the cloying funk of acetone and vomit. The lobby is generally crammed with groaning rednecks and blue, spew-choked corpses. Still, John received attention fairly promptly, probably because of his cute injury.

The attending doctor soon worked out that he wasn't in a life threatening condition, but was concerned about giving him anaesthetic because he was so pissed. She did give him a few injections, but he still started whimpering and shaking when she began to stitch him up.
She started mumbling a few platitudes to encourage him to stay still, but hadn't got far when, Quite abruptly, he stopped shivering and his eyes lost their focus. He burped. A weird, hollow, relaxed burp. The doctor went all quiet and stared at John, her nostrils flaring slightly with fear. Suddenly John's entire lower body convulsed, unloading a couple of litres of warm beer and clotted blood down the young doctor's front. She jumped backwards, swearing, and leaving the
needle dangling from the suture in John's lip.

A few litres later, John heaved himself upright, blowing vomit out his nose to clear his airway. He gawped at me accusingly before his eyes rolled back into his head and he fainted, rolling sideways off the gurney. His head hit the ground with a sickening squeak, the sound of skull plates sliding against each other, and his arm folded under his body unnaturally. Rather than stunning him, this seemed to bring him out of his faint. He rolled his head around to look at me
and vomited again. His cuts had reopened; the sutures had torn out. After a few rough breaths he fixed me with his best "fuck off and die" stare, and started to spit black blood and ill-formed words: "I'll 'ill 'ou, 'ou 'uck. 'Ou 'ick 'uck. 'Ou 'uck. 'Ou 'uck. 'Ou 'uck..."

I left.

--Will (w.hoyle@csc.somewhere.ac.nz)