half man, half inappropriate

I fell on a coffee table.

That’s probably the story I told you if you’ve been curious about the scar on my face for the past four years.  I apologize for covering up the truth, but if I had actually let everybody know what really happened, I probably wouldn’t have gotten the chance to not live at home for my college years.  Now that I’m back home where I’ll have breakfast every day, it’s only right that I reveal what really happened four years ago.

The year was 2006.  The month was September.  I had just graduated from Irvine High School months ago, Justin Timberlake succeeded in bringing sexy back, and the United States of America had a consistent line of white presidents without an end in sight.  For me, it was the beginning of a new era.  I was excited to start college at the University of California, Irvine and live in an apartment with my best friend since Titanic was a box office hit, James.  Though my mom was opposed to the idea of me not living at home because she loves me too much, she eventually let me did what I does.  (Does that even make sense?)

During this time, I still worked at In-N-Out.  I had transferred from the Tustin store to the Irvine store near UCI (how convenient) to take the orders of Irvine’s most spoiled, rudest, and highest customers.  I stacked my cheddar there weekdaily the whole summer to pay rent and eat double-doubles before my student loans eventually arrived.  One day, I came home smelling like french fries after a tiring shift as usual, but I noticed that James was watching YouTube videos of dry ice bomb explosions.  If you’re not familiar with this federally outlawed explosive, what you do is take a container such as a plastic bottle, fill it with a little hot water, drop in some dry ice, cap it, and get the motherf*ck away from it because it will eventually explode.  James rotated in his swivel chair toward me with a grin on his face.

“Let’s make some dry ice bombs.”

Because I’m down for whatever as long as I don’t go to jail and/or end up hurt, and it seemed like an entertaining activity for an 18-year-old fresh out of high school, I retorted:

“Alright.”

Well, I’m sure many of you have had jobs such that you get home exhausted and think to yourself, “I’d like to blow up sh!t today.”  James and I bicycled to the local Albertson’s to pick up some dry ice.  You need to be at least 18 years of age in order to purchase dry ice because dumbass minors like to get their appendages frostbitten or make dry ice bombs.  Fortunately for us, we were both responsible and 18 years old.  We asked the cashier if we could purchase some dry ice.  As excellent foreshadowing, he asked us:

“What are you guys gonna do?  Make dry ice bombs?”

James and I chuckled.

“Naw, man, we’re… it’s… for a party.  It’ll keep the drinks cool.”

or some equally silly excuse.  It’s been over four years since the incident happened.  We excitedly made it back to the apartment, and we were just exploding all of our empty recyclables.  Empty Gatorade bottles, Arrowhead bottles, orange soda bottles loved by Kel—it was all fair game.  We even placed a dry ice bomb inside a cardboard box outside of our patio, and it rocketed out of the box leaving a puncture hole.  Nothing could possibly go wrong.

We had some duds though.  Some of those bottles refused to explode.  There was especially this one dud that didn’t even explode when we threw it on the ground from our front balcony.  I picked it up, and James and I examined the plastic bottle’s perfectly pressurized shape—so close to our hands and faces.  This bottle didn’t even have ridges anymore; it was flawlessly smooth and round.  James decided it was a dud, and just tossed it a few meters away in front of us.  That’s when I instantly saw shades of dark purple and pink, and my vision went very dark, and through all that, I simultaneously heard a loud pop.

A warm, thick waterfall poured from above my left eye down my face and onto the concrete. That was about the time I figured out that I became a victim of dry ice bomb shrapnel and started screaming in pain.  I blinked my left eye several times.  I could still see out of it.

“I CAN STILL SEE OUT OF MY LEFT EYE!” I screamed with painful joy.  No eye patches or parrots on me, bitches.  I honestly thought I’d lose my left eye that night.

That was about all the happiness I’d get for the evening.  The agonizing pain from my wound continued to escalate as I pounded the concrete floor with the bottom of my fist in a placebo-like attempt to redirect the pain.  Fortunately, James and I lived across from a nurse who, for some reason, wasn’t Filipino.  It was dark outside, so we all went back to our apartment to examine the flesh wound in better light.  The non-Filipino nurse looked at it for a good few seconds.

“You’re gonna need stitches.”

I got a chance to see the entrance wound in the mirror, and it looked like I angered OJ Simpson.  The knife wound-like injury looked quite badass, but painful at the same time.  Life fluid was still oozing out, but James could only find a small, dark red towel to put on my face, so I’d never know how much blood came out to stain it.  After the small, free consultation with the non-Filipino nurse, James and I agreed that I needed medical attention.  Thus, he drove me to Irvine Regional Hospital while I called my mom with one hand and pressed a towel to my throbbing, bleeding face with the other.

“Hey Mom…Yeah, James is taking me to the hospital right now…Oh, I fell on a coffee table.”

We met my mother at the emergency room.  You could hardly call this place an emergency room.  I learned a valuable lesson that night.  If the nurse interviews you and asks you, “On a scale of 1 to 10, how bad is the pain?” say 10 if you want immediate, VIP access with bottle service and Benjamins raining all over the place.  Otherwise, it’s back to the mothaf*ckin’ waiting room for you with all those other people who thought they could man up.

“Uhh, 9.  Feels like a high 9,” I said with tears streaming down my face which were probably soaking up the towel, too.

“Well then, sit your bitch-ass the f*ck down,” she told me…from what I understood.

You see some crazy things in the emergency room: parents with crying babies, people with legs that don’t really look like legs anymore, adult men with their teenage girlfriends trying to get morning after pills or asking where the nearest coat hanger store is.

[Five hours later]

Regretting that I could have watched the entire Lord of The Rings trilogy while I waited, I finally saw a doctor.  This doctor must have been fresh out of doctor school.

“So, what happened to you?”

“I fell on a coffee table.”

“You fell on a coffee table on three different parts of your face?” he was most probably thinking, but didn’t question my shenanigans anyway.

That plastic shrapnel, man.  A large piece hit near where my left eyebrow began, and two smaller pieces hit the middle of my nose and near my right eyebrow.  As the friendliest person on Earth, my mom carried on some small talk with the doctor and mentioned that she used to be a nurse back in the day (a real Filipino nurse at that), and she shouldn’t have done that.  That just meant that his unforgivable amateur ass could relax while he was stitching up my face.

“Ma’am, could you hold the flashlight right there, please?  Thannnks.  I need some scissors, stat.”

So for the next couple of weeks, I looked like that without the bandage.  Blood, plasma, etc. would leak out of the wound and into my left eye such that I’d see things with a yellow hue half of the time.  Months after the incident, I thought I had an unusual case of acne around the wound area.  Fortunately, these pimples didn’t contain puss, they contained the last remaining fragments of plastic still lodged in my face.

DAYS SINCE LAST E.R. TRIP: 1,515