When You Know You've Had Too Much

Last night I was sitting in the restaurant where I used to work. I was with Josh and his friends. Josh was inhaling popcorn as fast as he could get it into his small napkin-lined basket. He was also trying to get a stranger he kept calling Vanessa (actual name: Jessica) to eat some popcorn out of his basket. "Please, for the love of God, just eat one piece!" he said, jiggling the basket in her general direction.

I was sitting between him and a waitress I used to work with. We were watching karaoke, which is apparently now a Friday night tradition at the restaurant. A man was belting out the words to Enrique Iglesias's "Hero."

But as entertaining as it was to listen to a middle-aged balding man cough out the lyrics to one of the schmaltziest songs of all time, his show would, in a matter of seconds, pale in comparison to the show put on by a chubby girl in a yellow hooded sweatshirt.

During the last song break I had noticed the girl in the yellow sweatshirt at the back of the bar. She was standing with an unattractive, grouchy-looking boy--but standing isn't the right word. Nothing about her was solid or stable. Her limbs flailed gummily through the air. Her legs trembled and gave out every few seconds, causing her to stumble into the grouchy-looking boy. I watched as she tripped and fell into the counter that holds the popcorn maker. She hit hard, went down, thumped on the floor. The boy knelt to help her up, but he didn't look happy about it.

Ten minutes later I was watching the Iglesias-wannabe abandon the microphone in favor of two young guys who started up a duet. Behind them I could see the girl wearing the yellow sweatshirt. She was wobbling across the floor. Then I watched as she stopped moving, stood deathly still, then went down as suddenly as she'd stopped moving. It was like watching those awful clips of football injuries--when a player gets hit in just the right spot with just the right force and goes down clean and cold. The stillness that comes after that is a scary stillness. Deathly stillness.

This girl was that still. And the noise her head had made when it made contact with the floor was shocking. It was like a small bomb had gone off near the salad bar, like she had gotten so fed up with that floating island in the middle of the restaurant that she wanted to smash it to pieces.

But the only thing in pieces was her. The grouchy-looking boy took one look at her passed out there on the floor and then he turned and left. He just left. He left her there in a lump on the floor, maybe breathing, maybe not.

No one did anything for at least thirty seconds. We all just stared. The karaoke boys were still singing. People at the bar were laughing. But that girl was not moving, not at all.

"I don't know if this is good," a girl sitting close to us said. "The way she hit her head--I don't know. Someone should do something."

This girl's friends--but not the boy--finally came up and crossed the floor to where she was sprawled. They tried poking her, shaking her, calling to her. And the karaoke boys sang, sang, sang.

Nothing. She wouldn't wake up. She was bleeding. And then it happened: a dark wet spot began to spread out from her crotch.

"Awww, Christ," the bartender said. "She's pissing herself."

The grouchy-looking boy was nowhere to be seen.

"If I ever pee my pants in a bar, just kill me, " the girl I used to waitress with said.

That wasn't what I was concerned with, though. I was more concerned with the boy who just left her there, with the friends who only came after her a few choruses after she'd fallen. She stayed on the floor by herself for a long time. I'd like to think that if I fell down and hit my head hard enough to make me go unconscious, which led to me peeing my pants, my friends would be there immediately to get me some new pants, a rag for the blood pouring from my head, and something to lean on.

After awhile, one of her friends decided they needed to call an ambulance because the yellow sweatshirted girl was not waking up. They called 911 and asked them to come. It took them twenty minutes to get there. In that time, the girl woke up and started gagging. The waitress I used to work with dashed across the restaurant and tugged the drainage bucket out from underneath the salad bar and slid it to the girl's friends who then tipped the bucket under her chin.

It was only then that the grouchy-looking boy came back. He stood with his arms crossed over his chest and watched as she threw up into the bucket and clutched a bar rag to her head to stop the bleeding. He watched as she passed out again, as the paramedics tried to yell her name and ask her how old she was and where she lived. He watched her get strapped onto the gurney. He watched as they wheeled her away.

I had never wanted to punch someone in the face as much as I did while I watched him trail after the paramedics, his arms still crossed, his eyes as bored and unconcerned as if he were watching someone needlepoint, as if he were listening to a five hour opera about love--which was something he clearly didn't understand, not even a little bit.