I’M IN THE EMERGENCY ROOM of Akron General Hospital, waiting for a doctor after having X-Rays taken of my chest, back and both legs. I’m part of what the staff here probably calls “the last call injuries”. Between the hours of 12 and 4 AM, there isn’t a bar in your city that has more drunks inside it than the ER. When I entered, around 3 AM, it was like entering Grand Central Station, but in a world where every passenger is drunk and has no idea what train to board. No, no, it was more like a giant monster attacked a Jimmy Buffett concert and I’m in the hospital all the victims were rushed to.

A guy across the aisle is in one of those two-person donkey costumes, but the second person is missing, so the ass-end of the costume is dangling on the floor as he stands above his friend, who is passed out. His friend was the ass-end of the costume and, from what I’m gathering, his friend could not see out of the costume (being the ass-end), so when they were singing karaoke, he accidentally backed his friend off the edge of the stage, who fell hard, ripping open the donkey costume and resulting in a concussion.

The worst part of injuring yourself in a donkey costume in August is that you feel the need to explain why you are in a donkey costume. Every time a doctor or nurse entered and asked what the problem was, this guy began with, “Well, first let me explain why we’re in a donkey costume…” (they were SMU grads).

I once read that the CDC, America’s best scientists, estimate that drinking costs the US economy $225 billion in lost wages due to workers not being able to perform well because of injuries or hangovers and I believe every penny of that is accurate based on what I’m seeing inside this ER. We are probably losing a couple billion in damaged donkey costumes alone.

Everyone here has a shocking, obvious injury – burns and fractures and wide, bleeding cuts, yet no one can remember how they hurt themselves. There’s a constant murmur of phrases like, “We’re still trying to piece it together” or “I’m not sure what happened” or, my favorite, “Honestly, Doc, I think I may have been given a bad beer”. Nobody here blames their injuries on alcohol. They each go out of their way to blame their injuries on everything but the volume of alcohol they consumed: one guy says he fell down two flights of stairs because the stairs weren’t built correctly; a women with alcohol poisoning says, “I think it was drinking in the hot sun that got me. As a doctor, you know this, but the sun is your worst enemy”.

I suppose, to a degree, I’m just like them. A doctor finally reaches me. He’s holding a packet of X-Rays and asks, “So what exactly happened?”

“I guess, Doc, well… I just really like Huey Lewis and The News.”

Huey Lewis and The News have always been my favorite band but, at this point — the late 1990s — they have fallen from their fame of the 1980s. I was fresh out of college, working as a network engineer in Cleveland, when my buddy Ray, a childhood friend, now in graduate school, returned home for the summer. Ray was studying to become a pharmacist and when we were making plans for the weekend, he mentioned a pharmacy convention that was in town. “Open bar; good food,” he assures me, then, after a pause in conversation, he mentions –as though it were an insignificant detail—Huey Lewis and The News will be playing at the convention.

“What?! I love Huey Lewis and The News! We gotta go!”

“I don’t know… It’s not open to the public. It’s invite-only. I can probably get a lanyard for myself, but how would we get you in?”

“The convention is run out of a hotel, right? We’ll go to happy hour there — everyone will be wearing the lanyards — and we’ll find some old guy that doesn’t want to go to the concert. Old guys don’t stay up for concerts. I’ll ask to borrow his lanyard and go as him!”

So we go to happy hour and get unexpectedly drunk. “Unexpectedly drunk” is a common phrase with my friends – we talk about drinking the way a sailor talks about weather, like it’s completely out of our hands. Well, I will argue to my wife, I had no intention of staying out late.. but… the bar was selling Manhattans for only $4. It might as well have kidnapped me.

We get drunk and, better yet, we find a lanyard! The plan works! We met Bob Doppell, an old guy attending the conference out of New Jersey who let me borrow his credentials. I went to the Huey Lewis and The News show as:

BOB DOPPELL
Vice President of Operations
CREATIVE HEALTHCARE SOLUTIONS
Morristown, New Jersey

We go to the show and it’s open bar and it’s great. We spend a lot of time near the bar and I’m pretty good about introducing myself as “Bob”, remembering my fake credentials, and each person I meet is curious about the strategy behind CREATIVE HEALTHCARE. “What makes it so creative?” they ask and I probably should have avoided the question, but, I thought to myself:

God dammit, I’m Bob Doppell. I’m the Vice President of this company! I probably built it by hand and Bob Doppell didn’t get where he was by evading questions at an open bar, so I’m gonna do what Bob Doppell would do and answer this question and hit it out of the park…

*******

Stumble through the rest of this Black Friday bender in Sheriff Nottingham XV – coming out November 23rd!

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