Poker Night

Towards the end of my third and final year in LA, I started playing poker every Tuesday with some friends from Sam Ash. Though I had been laid off from the job some months before, the friends I had made there were solid and we still saw each other a lot, though finding time to within everybody’s “project” filled schedules (lot of things happening, lot of big stuff going on, big things, big things happening, real exciting) was tricky, so an organized poker night once a week seemed like the perfect way to get everyone together. Though at first, it was just an excuse to drink. A lot.
One night a few weeks in, three of us sat around the table long after the game had ended. We were trying to get drunk – all of us were too broke that week to throw the game away and so we had played to the best of our abilities and limited our alcohol consumption. After several hands of up the river, down the river, and many, many shots of Jack Daniels and Jaigermeister, we felt ready to brave the outdoors. It was two AM.
My friends Zack, Kali and I left the house silently; Kali and I smoking cigarettes, Zack with his hands in his pockets. We walked up the road outside her house, looking at sleeping homes. I was drunker than a hobo on a Monday morning. Drunk enough to start hopping fences with an audacity I didn’t think I had. Zack and Kali watched, amused and disgusted, from the street. On my third garden adventure, I returned with an enormous grin and an even bigger plant – bordering on small tree – in a rather charming ceramic pot. I’m not sure how I managed to get it out of the garden (truth be told, I don’t remember taking it at all) – the spinach-like powers of alcohol had made me momentarily the strongest person in the world.
“You’re not taking that with you,” Zack said. I ignored him. I felt drunk and triumphant. This was my plant now and I loved it. We started off down the street again, and I immediately wished I had listened to Zack: the plant was a bitch to carry. I threw him my most flirtatious grin, which probably came off more on the side of drunken leer.
“Hey…you wanna carry this?”
“No,” he said firmly.
“Ah fuck you then,” and I abruptly put the plant down and clambered over a six foot wall into the next garden. It was beautiful – I stood on smooth white tiles with my hands on my hips and surveyed its curves and corners. I washed my hands in a marble fountain. I took flowers off bushes and put them in my hair. I went right up to the sliding glass door and put my face against it, peering through my breath into a living room filled with bone china and a grand piano.
“There’s no one home!” I yelled out to Zack and Kali. “You guys should come in!” They didn’t respond. Suddenly, I was paranoid: Kali was trying to snake my deal. I was sure of it. She and Zack were behind some trash cans down the street somewhere, making out like animals. My drunkenly angry state propelled me back over the wall – with a brief pitstop on the way as I attempted to steal a marble statue of the Virgin Mary, which was unfortunately too heavy to lift over.
On the other side, Zack and Kali were indeed behind some trash cans – hiding, not making out. They looked absolutely furious with me as I hopped down into the street, and we ran like bandits until we couldn’t run anymore. The road curved upwards – we were climbing up a big hill. At the top, we stopped, puffing, and smoked a cigarette while we looked at the city. To be totally honest, I don’t remember much of the view.
I do remember what happened next though. We turned to walk back down the hill, and as a lark, or more likely, to prove something, I started running. I wanted to impress Zack, and in my extremely intoxicated state, I apparently thought that running down a large hill was the way to go about this. Boys love girls that can run down steep slopes, right? Of course, I’m sure you know what happens next: I have wildly misjudged the steepness of this hill, and within ten seconds am running flat out, faster than I have ever run in my life, arms flailing like Muppet arms, legs snapping out in front of me like dangerous alien vehicles.
“I can’t stop.” I think. The three most dangerous words in the English language. “I can’t stop. I can’t stop. I can’t stop. I can’t stop. I can’t stop.” It rattles around in my skull like a bad pop song – it begins to match the rhythm of my steps. What’s going to happen if I don’t stop? I’m going to fall. What happens if I fall? I am going to die. I can see it now; one trip, one tiny rock in the road, and I will go down, face over feet, fists flying. My nose will be ground to a nub on the tarmac. Drunk idiot loses nose in freak hill-climbing accident – Michael Jackson recommends surgeon the headline will read. Or worse, I will land on top of my head and my neck will snap, like that guy in the surfing video I saw in Jr. High who went under a wave and got his head stuck in the sand, and then the force of the wave snapped his neck and he was paralyzed but totally conscious face-down in the water and drowned. That’s why I don’t surf. If only there was some grass. I look quickly from side to side, but there is none. There is, however, a black Mercedes parked about twenty feet away.
“That will stop me.” I think, and I steer my wildly flapping appendages into it.

The impact is incredible. The top of the trunk hits me directly in the stomach, and I fold like a ragdoll. My face hits the top of the trunk with such force that my nose feels icy cold and my lips feel immediately swollen, and almost instantly my neck snaps my head into its usual place like a mousetrap, as though the car were made of a trampoline. The wind is immediately gone from me. Gone so fast I feel nauseous and my stomach cramps. Have I ever actually breathed before in my life? What is breathing anyway? I can’t remember. And yet, as much as it may feel like there is nothing inside me anymore, as though the walls of my stomach are touching each other like deflated bellows, a barely audible hollow whine is squeaking out of my mouth. How can there possibly be anything left inside me to come out? Why can I not breathe in? The whine gets louder and louder, the pitch gets higher and higher, as the severity of the pain I am feeling becomes clear to me. I collapse forward and sideways, my body folding like a scarecrow with its insides torn out. I lay on my face on the ground, my ass in the air, gasping and trying to cry.
“Lizzie Lizzie Lizzie Lizzie, you’re okay, you’re okay!” Zack is suddenly there, barreling down on me, picking me up, turning me over. All I can think is, “Fuck, I hope my underwear isn’t showing.”
“Shhh! Shh!” He is shushing me. For a moment we are married and we have just lost our firstborn child (or something tragic) and I am standing against him in a green hospital waiting room, sobbing into his shoulder. His well-chiseled, perfectly tanned shoulder with one mole on it. What I would give to have unrestricted access to that shoulder. In reality he is not soothing me; he is trying to shut me up before someone wakes up and comes outside. I am wailing short little wails, punctuated with sobs and snorts. I sound like a suckling pig. Kali trots up behind him.
“You’re okay girly!” she coos, in her Tennessee drawl, and after that I don’t remember anything until we are almost back at the house.

I am whimpering. Zack and Kali are walking a few steps ahead of me, talking, ignoring my pathetic state. Their initial fears are gone – now I’m just an idiot.
“Why? Why? Why?” I keep moaning. My wrist is severely swollen and immovable. I feel as though someone is driving a knife into my ribs. When we get to the house, they help me onto the couch. It hurts to lie down. It hurts to breathe. “Thank god I’m drunk,” I think, “at least I should pass out quickly enough.”
I don’t. I lay on the couch for about ten minutes, whimpering and quietly gasping. Once Teri’s dog got attacked by a coyote – right outside this house – and he lay on this couch all through poker, whimpering and quietly gasping. We all knew he was fine – that’s why we ignored him. Zack and Kali are in the kitchen, drinking and talking. I wish I was in there with them. Finally, Zack comes into the living room like a zombie, tripping and stumbling. He flops onto the other couch. I am so close to him I can almost reach out and touch him but I am in so much pain that I can’t move. I am miserable. Before I finally pass into sweet unconsciousness, I show him my most miserable face and slur, “Hey, can we cuddle?”
“No,” he says firmly.

The sun is peering through the window at me. Probably laughing. The bastard. This is not just a hangover – this is a full-body catastrophe of epic proportions. My wrist is broken. I can tell without opening my eyes. There is dried blood cracking and flaking on my upper lip and chin. I sit up, and am sharply reminded that I have ribs and that several of them may be broken. The pain makes me cry out loud. Zack is still on the other couch. He opens one eye, shakes his head and goes back to sleep.
Kali is on the deck smoking a cigarette. I stand next to her and light one up.
“Your face…” she says.
“I don’t wanna know.”
“You should probably go to the emergency room.”
“Yeah. I think my wrist is broken.”
“Are you serious?”
I nod.
“Shit.”
“Yeah.”
She starts giggling. “You were just running so fuckin’ fast! Zack and I were like, she’s gonna wreck. And then we just heard this THUD! I wish I had my camera.” I cannot help but laugh too, though every breath feels like a knife in my side. I have the image in my head now; me running madly down this enormous hill like a puppet with the strings cut off, straight into the back of a parked car. A run-and-hit. It’s like something off America’s Funniest Home Videos.
“And then on the way back, you just kept moaning ‘what was I trying to prooooove?’” She is doubled over now. I can’t stop laughing either, as much as it’s killing me. It’s the same feeling you get from being tickled mercilessly: what I really want to do is cry, but all I can do is laugh.
“Oh fuck,” I gasp. “Oh fuck. What the fuck was I thinking?” I regain control. We smoke in silence for a minute or so, watching the sun rise over Echo Park. “Fuck, okay. I should probably go. I told Emily I would meet her for coffee.”
“You’re not going to the ER?”
“Eventually. Right now I’m a person desperately in need of coffee.”
“Sure.” She stubs out her cigarette. “Hey, there’s a present on your car.”
“What?”
“Check it out.” She points around the corner of the house. I hobble to the edge of the deck and look.
There, bathing in the glorious rays of the early morning sun, set on the hood like a first place trophy, is my humongous plant in its rather charming pot.
“Zack carried it home,” she says.
“Right on.”