By Elle Quintana, talent buyer at Reggies
This happened in, I think, the summer of 2006. I was bartending at Big Horse. And I got wasted when I bartended there. After a shift, I decided to go to a late-night bar. I grabbed a cab to Underbar, on Western near Belmont. By myself. Obliterated.
As I was exiting the cab I had one foot on the sidewalk and one on the street, and the cabdriver just starts going even though I’m still kind of drunkenly shutting the car door and he drives over my foot. And he keeps going! Never slows down, never looks back.
A crowd starts gathering around me because I’m screaming and crying and everyone’s asking if I’m OK and they want to call an ambulance or the police but I’m like, “No, if I go to the hospital I won’t get out of there until after 5 AM and all the bars will be shut down. I really need a beer.”
I drag myself past the crowd into Underbar—actually, no, sorry, I ended up going to Blue Light next door because it was slightly closer to where the cab drove over me and was an easier crawl into that bar.
I hobble in and order a beer.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m absolutely so sure.”
I think the reason I went there is I wanted to get laid. In fact, I’m certain that was the reason—it was always easy to get laid there, and sure enough, this hot guy sits next to me and we have a few drinks and after a while he asks, “Wanna go to my place?”
“I can’t walk.”
“No problem at all.”
He helps carry me out of the bar and we get to his place and that’s when I find out he lives in his grandma’s basement. And I can’t walk, so he has to help me slide down the steps, and when we get to the bottom I realize not only does he live in his grandma’s basement, he has a water bed.
So we do the best we can to try and have sex on a water bed while my foot is in terrible pain.
I wake up the next morning and he sees my foot and wants to take me to the hospital, but I don’t have health insurance so I tell him to just take me to a bar. Also, I couldn’t find my underwear. To this day I wonder if he stole them or if I plain old lost them. But he carries me up and I go to, I think, Pontiac. And from there I hop bars. I guess it was more of a crawl—a literal pub crawl until I have to start my shift at Big Horse.
I limp into Big Horse and my boss sees how I’m walking and says I can’t work like that. He and my best friend, Jenny, who is the voice of reason in my life, say I need to go to the hospital, but I tell them I want to work. So my boss says, “Work the door where you can sit. I’ll bartend.” Which was really nice but allowed me to get even more wasted.
I wake up the next day and now even I agree: I need to see a doctor. My lower leg looks like a huge, beige tube, and my toes look like giant raisins dangling from my foot.
Jenny takes me to the hospital, and once the attendants see my foot they all step back. The doctor freaks out: “WHEN DID THIS HAPPEN?!” I say two days ago, and I think he’s almost ready to faint. “You can get diseases, infections!”
They X-ray me and it turns out I have nine broken bones in my foot. They put me in a cast and give me crutches and some Vicodin for the pain. And now that I have Vicodin, I go to Schubas on crutches to see Earlimart.
A few weeks later, I’m back at Big Horse and I’m still working the door while my boss bartends and I see this really hot guy walk by so I grab my crutches and hobble over and yell, “Hey, want a drink?” He smiles—he’s drunkenly delighted about me hopping on crutches to buy him a drink.
We ended up dating for four years.
When I started getting hospital bills, I went to the police station across from Underbar and Blue Light and asked if I could see the tapes from that night to try and find the cab and maybe have the driver’s insurance pay for my hospital bill. The police told me there isn’t a single camera outside the station. So if you ever want to run over someone with your car or sell drugs on a corner or whatever, do it in front of a police station. It’s the last place they put cameras. v