My Jaw
by Eric McDade

A few years, His Name Is Alive came to Philadelphia with Komeda. I kind of know Warn and Chad from when I used to live in the Detroit area, so I figured I’d go see the show and say hi. When I got there they hadn’t set up yet and Komeda cancelled because one of them was sick. Warn invited me upstairs to hang out and chat for a while. They weren’t much for drinking, so they kept offering me the beer the bar supplied them with and asked if I felt like helping them set up. A handful of beers later, we went downstairs and set up, they played, and I continued to drink their beer. I was good and loaded by the end of the night, so a couple friends of mine offered me a ride, but I had my bike with me (That’s bicycle, not motorcycle). So, I got on my bike and started to ride home. A couple blocks from the bar, I found myself on the ground. Apparently I had hit something in the sidewalk and gone chin-first over the handlebars and into the pavement. I stood up quickly and surveyed the damage. My chin had been cut open and was bleeding pretty well. So I got back on the bike and rode the rest of the way home with blood splattering all over my coat. When I got home I took a look at my chin and cleaned it up a bit. By then it seemed to be under control and the bleeding had almost stopped completely, so I went to bed. The next morning I woke up with an enormous hangover. Aside from that, things didn’t feel quite right and I was unable to open my mouth. So, I went to the bathroom mirror to check it out. My face was huge. It was just enormous and cockeyed. Nothing about it was right at all. I began walking down the street trying to catch a cab, but didn’t have much luck for several blocks, which is completely understandable considering my coat was covered with blood and my head was the size of a basketball. When I finally got one, the driver didn’t notice my state until I got inside. He looked at me in the rearview mirror and his eyes got huge. He didn’t even attempt to be tactful. It was beautiful. He just asked, “What the fuck happened to you?” real slowly. So I figured I’d play the battered child card and just tell him “I fell down.” He didn’t say another word the whole time. He just kept looking back in the mirror with his big eyes. When I got to the hospital, they took me in pretty quickly. The nurse was asking all kinds of questions, and then she stopped. I hadn’t been able to brush my teeth with my mouth not properly functioning, so I guess she got a whiff of the beer on my breath from the night before. She asked if I’d been drinking, and when I told her I had, she just laughed, called me a schmuck, and walked away. About eight hours later, they decided to admit me for surgery the next day, as I had broken my jaw in three places. I had fractured my left condylar process as well as the middle of my mandible, and completely shattered my right condylar process. So I went into surgery and woke up afterward very drugged and feeling very nice despite the broken jaw. They had to put three screws in my jaw, and it had to be wired shut for three weeks. I was given a morphine drip and a pair of wire cutters in case I needed to throw up. When I was released, I got a prescription for some type of liquid codeine cocktail which was quite satisfying in lieu of the morphine (One of my friends felt the same way about the codeine, as she made short work of it while visiting me). Of course, I was only able to eat what could be loaded into a huge syringe and pumped through a tube shoved behind my teeth. I think the worst thing I tried was blending up some chicken lo mein. I quickly became a connoisseur of milkshakes and came up with a recipe I never got sick of: one can of vanilla Ensure, a couple scoops of vanilla ice cream, ½ glass of milk, a packet of vanilla Carnation Instant Breakfast, a shot of vanilla extract, and a couple handfuls of Cap’n Crunch. My mouth was made wire-free a few weeks later, and I had a wonderful Thanksgiving dinner at my friend’s house the following night. Of course, all I was able to eat was stuffing and candied yams, but they were the best stuffing and candied yams I’ve ever eaten. In fact, I don’t think I’ve had any kind of food that good since.