Jeff is in blue.
Justin is in red.
Mario, as always, is in green...
For the NIN show at America West Arena in Phoenix, Super and I of course do a little pre-concert drinking near the arena. We ended up going in a little inebriated, meeting up with JC and doing our usual lap around scoping out the chicks. Super and JC headed down to the floor…Super naturally to the pit…and I end up heading to the second level where some people I knew were sitting - that was the last time I saw Super until after the show. So I hook up with JC on the phone afterwards to find out where Super and he are at…I am told they are already outside and the only sober thinking person - JC - informs me that I should probably hurry out and that there will be a little surprise when I arrive. Not thinking much of it, I exit and search for them among the crowd until I hear a yell for me coming from the other direction. I turn around to see JC standing there with Super, who was sitting on a pillar with a fucked up bandage wrapped around his head and a silly grin on his face. I headed over to try to figure out what the fuck had happened.
Apparently, Super was in the pit and inadvertently took a shot to the noggin somehow. (It was a falling elbow from someone else who had been crowd surfing. Mario said it hit him "perfectly squarely," if there is such a thing.) He continued on through the crowd until people started looking at him weird, while blood was dripping down his face all over himself, only then did he begin to realize that something may be wrong. As he headed up, the security people were trying to convince him that he should take a break and that they should call him an ambulance. Well, Super was having no part of that even after they showed him in a mirror what had happened to his face…hell, he would be missing the rest of the concert and he didn’t really think it looked all that bad to him at the time. So as a sort-of-sorts compromise, the staff wrapped his head up in a mummy-like fashion and sent him back into the crowd.
As I reached them outside, “Hey Chaucer, don’t you work at a hospital close by here…you think you can stitch me up?”
“Sure Super,” slurring my own words, “I can do that shit up real quick before we head to the bars.”
Jeff's memory is an interesting thing, but let me just say, I went in to the concert to watch the opening acts and he and Mario stayed across the street doing their ritual until about 10 minutes before Nine Inch Nails took the stage. The only communication I had with either of them was via text message, which was sporadic at best. I remember being on the barricade during the show, and when the last song came on with only a minute remaining, here comes Super over the top of the crowd, crowd surfing like it was no big deal. He had had enough to drink that night that he was pretty much lost in his own body. I looked at him as security helped him down to the floor, and here was this BIG bandage wrapped around his head. Later, he would deny that he crowd surfed after they wrapped him up. He never admitted to it, which was funny because......well, I must have really been imagining things. With all the water I had been drinking no less.
When we got outside he unwrapped his head and showed me this nice gash about an inch long and a quarter-inch to half-inch wide splitting his eyebrow in two.
Can’t you just superglue that shit closed back at the house? I laughed pretty hysterically, “no Super, I responded, we have to get you to a hospital so you can get stitches.” Jeff arrived a moment later and we took a snapshot of Super's head. Of course, of course, Jeff laughed hysterically too. It was a pretty funny moment for all of us.
No man, fuck that shit, it’s not that bad! I guess I’ll let the pictures do the talking there. Notice the impish grin? He had to sign a waiver for the first aid staff at America West to release him. For some reason, that made him happy.
We were right up the street from St. Joseph's hospital so away we went. I accompanied Mario into the triage area where a nurse stitched him up, leaving Jeff out in the waiting room sitting. Despite all the shenanigans that took place that night, he and I were still able to quote some lines from “Fight Club.” In the movie there is a scene where Edward Norton is sitting in an emergency room setting getting his head stitched up by a nurse as well. Brad Pitt, who is Edward Norton’s alter-ego and appears throughout the entire movie as a man named Tyler Durden, is sitting up in the background on a countertop.
Edward: “Sometimes Tyler spoke for me.”
Brad: “He fell down some stairs.”
Edward: “I fell down some stairs.”
Those were the exact lines Mario and I repeated while he was getting his suture. Another night I'll never forget...
