So the other night I met up with a friend for happy hour at this saloon style bar that has like old style drinks and grilled cheese sandwiches. I’m sitting at the bar chatting it up when all of a sudden there is this big ‘WHOMP!’ The floor shakes. I look down and see this guy (maybe 45 years old) lying flat on the floor next to my bar stool. It was only like 5:30-ish and my first reaction was like, ‘WTF! How drunk are you at 5:30, dude!?’

But I noticed he was weirdly lying on the ground. Face on the floor. Arms at his sides. Too flat. Too out. Us bar people just sort gasped and wtf-ed and stared. This woman gets to his side and shakes his back a couple times. The guy isn’t moving at all. We’re all just standing looking at each other like, ‘Ummm… Why isn’t he moving?’ Then the woman looks up us idiots and yells, ‘Someone call 911!!!’ The whole bar snapped out of it. I was like, ‘OMG! That’s a friggin dead guy! That guy literally like just dropped friggin dead! Dead guy red alert!’ I’ve never seen a real life new dead person before (thank god) but I felt like I could definitely spot one! And that guy if anyone– was one!

I get on my cellphone (a half-dozen people did the same) and we all called 911 at the same time. ‘9-11 What’s your emergency?’ I’m like, ‘Guy is like… on the floor… not moving and…well… unconscious… that’s kind of all I got…..’ As the 911 operator was taking the information– the guy on the floor all of a sudden wakes up like a brand new zombie. He gets up and starts walking. His woman friend is sort of guiding him toward the door. I give the play-by-play to 911 like, ‘Umm… Ok… cancel the unconsciousness. Now he’s up off the floor and he’s sort of shuffling and…’ (He definitely wasn’t drunk btw. This was some sort of medical thing).

He takes like five steps and he goes over again. Falling like life just left him in a snap. Shoulders first. Matrix unplugged style. People tried to slow his fall but the dead weight thing was just too much. He hit his face on a table and crumbled to the floor again. Out cold. His head started bleeding and I continued giving the 911 person the play-by-play, ‘Ok… He’s down again. He’s dead again…’ I could hear all us 911 callers giving the same info at the same time. And I was thinking this is 911 overkill big time– but how do you hang up on 911 when you’re half-way through the call?

After 30-seconds of straight-out lifelessness– the guy wakes up again! Undead! And this time people tell him to stay down but he doesn’t even seem to see us or hear us. He just gets to his feet and the whole bar in unison goes, ‘No no no no no…!’ Literally everyone was going ‘No no no!’ But he slowly walked outside and sat down on the bench in front of the bar with the woman.

Some people followed him out and kept watch over him until the ambulance came (which took under 10 minutes– but it seemed like a very long time considering we were across the street from a friggin hospital) the EMTs (what a friggin action packed job btw!) threw him in the back and took him away. We never found out what his condition was or whatever. (Narcolepsy?) The bar soon returned to normal. I ate my grilled cheese.

Anyway, a few days later I bumped into the friend who was with me at the bar– and he was like, ‘Hey, man. I saw Crumbles smoking a cigarette out by the Trader Joes. He had a big bandaid on his head but otherwise he seemed totally fine!’ It took me a second– but then I got it. And I was like, ‘Really dude? You’re going full blast nickname on the guy? And ‘Crumbles‘?’

I gotta admit it was a pretty solid nickname though…

ok bye!
tOdd

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