I spent the evening of my 25th birthday at the Hurricane Café in Seattle, dining on biscuits and gravy and Bloody Mary’s, courtesy of small group of close friends that I reluctantly decided to celebrate the occasion with. I vaguely recall that it took some convincing to get me to agree to go out that night, as I’d not been in good spirits all that week–something about reaching the milestone of a quarter century on the planet wasn’t sitting well with me, and the closer I got to my birthday, the more withdrawn I had become. Still, if a handful of friends wanted to celebrate my life, who was I to deprive them of the opportunity?
Only four years earlier, I’d had my first legal liquor at the Hurricane, then known as the Dog House Restaurant: Long Island Iced Tea, consumed while listening to Seattle legend Dick Dickerson playing piano at the bar. Sometime in 1994 the Dog House become the Hurricane for reasons unknown. Either way, it was sort of a second home to me back then, regardless of the name on the door.
I remember sitting in one of the many red vinyl booths, soaking up the usual Friday night banter. Conversations were lively, the music was loud as it always was, the stench of grease, booze and cigarettes as comforting as it was unbearable. Me? I sat in silence for what seemed like hours, wondering what I was supposed to be doing with my life. There I was, 25 years old, incapable of even living paycheck to paycheck, blowing every dollar I had on perfecting my own personal brand of escapism. The only positive in my life was that this birthday happened to fall on a Friday, so I had a couple hundred bucks in my pocket, but that was about it.
In hindsight, I remember that my “friends” and I filled a table with over 10 people, but I only remember one of their names, and I only remember her name because we dated for a few months.
As the evening wore on, I became increasingly despondent – not by choice, more due to the effects of Blood Mary overconsumption mixed with a variety of other substances I would partake in back then. At around 1:00 am, a friend of my then-girlfriend challenged me to a few games of Virtua Fighter, one of several beat up, nicotine-stained arcade machines that sat adjacent to the front door. I had a sort of crush on this miserable little pixie of a woman, for reasons that are still a mystery to me, so I took the opportunity to drop a couple of bucks into the machine as a means of at least getting some quality flirting out of the evening. After all, finding a female in Seattle that knew what Virtua Fighter was, let alone played it competently was probably about as rare as winning the Lottery in those days.
$2 and four games later, I had been resoundingly beaten 4 times.
It seems incredibly stupid now but that was the straw that broke the proverbial camel’s back for me that night. Not only was a 25, broke 9 days out of every 10, and struggling to maintain even the slightest interest in life, but I couldn’t even manage to beat “a girl” at a fucking video game that I’d played hundreds of times by that point. Happy fucking birthday to me.
In a panic, a million negative questions ran through my head. What good was I? What was the point? Did it ever get any better? And would I ever kick this vicious cycle of earning money, burning money, and smoking, drinking, snorting, or injecting what I purchased with it?
One of my favorite phrases in those days was to tell people to “go play in traffic.” Hardly original, I know, but I’d been using it for so long that it served me well as a reliable knock whenever I couldn’t think of anything more original. I often visualized it when I said it, picturing the source of my ire, comically dodging oncoming cars – just to see how long they could do so before their inevitable demise. It always used to make me laugh.
On that evening, October 18th, 1996 (it was technically October 19th by that point, but what difference does it really make?) I distracted my Virtua competitor, ditched my so-called friends, pushed the front door open, and started down the sidewalk. From there, I turned right on Denny Way and headed for the Interstate 5 on-ramp. If anyone should “go play in traffic” it was me.
Back in 1996, Denny Way and the surrounding area was less complex than it is now. The Denny Substation was years away from conception and the businesses around Denny, west of Capitol Hill, were either shit hole bars or industrial and automotive establishments – all of them closed long before the 1:00 am hour. I remember recognizing my surroundings only to a point, until I didn’t. I’m not sure how I managed to miss Stewart Street, the fastest possible route to certain doom by fast-moving vehicle; I lived on fucking Capitol Hill, after all. I’d walked this a hundred times or more, in daylight and at night, in every possible weather. And yet somehow, at my most angry, my most defeated, and most desperate, I ended up down on Republican Street, exhausted and surrounded by dark storefronts and the odd wino.
It started raining about 5 minutes before my legs and resolve gave out, and I simply sat down, right there on the corner of Pontius and Republican, unable to continue. I was furious. Fuming, I got back up and punched at a glass window so hard that I put my hand right through it, blood immediately pouring out of my right hand. The jolt of seeing my injury lasted only a few seconds, and then I lost consciousness.
I woke up the following morning to two of Seattle’s finest standing over me. I’d somehow managed to find myself a doorway, though I don’t remember doing so, and I propped myself up, trying my best to understand what the cop was asking, my hand and head throbbing.
Foolishly, I assumed he wanted to know if I was ok.
“Did you break that window?” he asked.
“No,” I said, and to be honest, it wasn’t really a lie, at least not for another 30 seconds or so because I genuinely had no recollection of any of the events of the previous evening.
“Then why are you bleeding?” the cop asked.
“Cut myself,” I replied.
“Right. Did you cut yourself breaking that window?”
“No.”
“Then how did you cut yourself?”
“I was playing Virtua Fighter,” I said.
“You got in a fight?”
“No. I was playing Virtua Fighter at the Hurricane.”
“What the fuck are you talking about?”
“Virtua Fighter,” I said. I didn’t have anything else. I remembered the humiliation of getting my ass kicked at a fucking video game and almost nothing further. That was my story, or at least that’s what I could remember right then at that moment.
The talking cop was starting to get annoyed with me, I could tell. His partner seemed more amused by my predicament than anything.
“Do you have any ID?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Left it in a cab,” I said.
“A cab dropped you off here?”
“No. I left it in a cab on my birthday.”
“When was your birthday?”
“Last night.”
“So, you left your ID in a cab last night?”
“No. My other birthday,” I said. On my 24th birthday I drunkenly left my wallet in a cab and couldn’t be bothered to get another ID until I was 29, but that’s another story.
“Are you carrying any weapons or narcotics?”
I looked down at my hands, one in near-mint condition, the other caked with so much dried blood that I couldn’t even tell how messed up it was.
“No,” I replied, and then I held both of my hands up to show him. I wasn’t carrying anything.
I’m don’t recall exactly what the cop said next, only that was it was an insult, and not even a very good one. Something that implied I lacked intelligence. Pretty rich, coming from a cop.
So, I laughed.
“What’s so funny?” the cop asked.
“Go play in traffic,” I said.