So last night my band played a really awesome show in a big city in central Europe. The crowd was great, the show was damn near perfect, and my drumming was fuckin’ sick if I do say so myself 
. After the show we hung out with a bunch of fans just sitting on the edge of the stage drinking beer, signing autographs, and sharing stories and such with whoever wanted to kick it for a good four hours. Awesome night and then some assholes had to spoil it…
A few hours into the after show chill sesh, I decided to go see if the techs and roadies needed any help loading the truck and buses because we were gonna have to hit the road straight from the venue to head to the next city. I headed out the back and found them all handling business loading up the buses and I headed over to check the truck which was all loaded except for the lighting rig we hadn’t taken down yet becausr it was lighting the venue where we were kickin’ it with the fans.
As I neared the truck, I heard a loud noise like something breaking, heard some voices half whispering, and then I see the back door to the truck (which is supposed to be locked) open a bit. No one is supposed to be over there since all our guys were at the buses so I run around the truck and catch two dudes back there one up in the truck starting to hand road cases out to his buddy who’s coming back from taking the first case to their van which is parked about 15ft away with the back open. One dude takes off running to the van, but I tackled the second guy as he jumped out of the truck. He starts trying to hit me with the fuckin’ pry bar he used to pry the lock/handle off the truck. Naturally, I started beatin’ the brakes off this motherfucker trying to put him out in time to maybe catch his partner or a license plate or something. Dude on the ground took three good licks and starts snoring. Job number one out of the way, I go to hop up and BAM the side of my face gets walloped by something REALLY hard. I was literally seeing stars (those little light bursts) and fighting off the tunnel vision that creeps in when you’re on the edge of going out. I have enough CQC training and experience to stay relatively together and aware during such times and I managed to get my eyes on the person who hit me.
Turns out the second dude decided to come back and help his buddy (props for not being a total weasel and leaving his friend to get fucked up alone). When I get him in my sights I see that he’s holding a big mag-lite style flashlight and he’s coming at me with it again. I let him get close, launched into his hips and took him down while his second swing landed pretty harmlessly on my upper back. I quickly rolled to his side, took his back, and pulled a choke hold so tight I felt his his back pop a couple times as I flexed my hips in, straightened him out, and put him to sleep.
I got up right as the cavalry arrived after hearing yelling and realized I still wasn’t feeling great. The right side of my face felt like it was actively caving in, my nose and mouth were bleeding quite a bit, and I was still pretty wobbly. Long story short, we wait for police and paramedics to arrive to attend to the two-bit theives and then I have my bassist and drum tech take me to the ER. The doctors had to shoot my jaw full of novacaine and steroids to get the swelling to go down from where the Mag-Lite hit so they could put my dislocated jaw back in and the x-rays say I have three non-displaced fractures to go with the back molar that’s now broken in half. I had to refuse the morphine and hydrocodone prescriptions because I might be a decade out from being strung out, but I’m still not trying to tempt fate like that.
All of that to say, my face fuckin’ HURTS. And on top of that I’m embarrassed that I took two punches too many to handle the first jackass and let that second little bitch get the drop on me. In my younger days when I was still on top of my training that shit never would have happened. Worst of all, those fuckers ruined a great night and I have been in an absolutely terrible mood since. And if that wasn’t enough, my PTSD and hypervigilance/paranoia are now running fucking rampant so I haven’t even been able to shrug it off and calm the fuck down yet. I haven’t been this keyed up in a long time. So yeah… that’s my rant. Thanks…
