Ribbed
First I should say that I’m not a big drinker. I probably take about five standard drinks a week. A few more if I’ve just been, say, sacked from a radio network. But about three times a year, I get led astray by friends and the evening usually ends the next morning, whereupon I regain consciousness and discover the true cost of my night out. Last time, I found I’d left my expensive prescription sunglasses in the back of a cab. The time before that, I returned to the restaurant car park the next morning to discover that someone had stoved in the back end of my car and just driven away, without leaving a note. And the time before that, I awoke to the realisation that I had somehow paid a cab driver $120 for a seven-minute journey.
So what lesson can be learned from all this? Surely that you should NEVER TAKE A CAB HOME WHEN YOU'RE DRUNK!
That may have been my mistake on this latest occasion. I wish I could tell you; I have no memory of what happened. All I know is, these ribs didn’t break themselves.
Not wanting to accord the drinking even any comedic heroism, I shall refrain from describing the festivities themselves. Someone had received some good news and this was duly celebrated. Well after midnight, I was poured into a taxi and sent on my way. From this point, it is as though somebody has erased large sections of the security tape. I can recall briefly waking up in the back of the cab and registering a sideways view of my house. Sometime after that, I remember thinking, ‘I’m…yes…I’m falling over. That’s the ground coming towards me at an odd angle and it looks like I’m about to collide with it.’ Then I woke up, in bed, around ten o’clock on Sunday morning. With a sharp pain in my side.
‘Must have pulled a muscle,’ I announced, having observed no bruises or marks on the afflicted area. I was then informed that during the night I had fallen out of bed. Twice. ‘Who falls out of bed?’ I replied, confused. ‘That only happens in cartoons, not in real life.’ And even if I had, with nothing but the floor to fall onto, there was no way the pain had been caused by me landing on something. Not unless I’d left, say, an ARIA Award next to my bed, for the purposes of impressing a prospective partner. But I hadn’t done that. Not for years. ‘It’s a pulled muscle, that’s what it is. Has to be.’ This expert self-diagnosis was confirmed by a friend, the actor Lachy Hulme. He had experienced a similar injury a year earlier and it had turned out to be a torn muscle (unfortunately, an accompanying story involving his subsequent massage by a well-known actress is not suitable for print here.) And although he’s not technically a doctor, I’m pretty sure he’s played one on TV at some point.
Come Monday morning the pain was, if anything, worse. I was unable to sleep on my left side, and simple actions like turning on a tap or deleting an abusive e-mail felt like someone was pressing a red-hot cattle brand into my side. I kept checking my torso, expecting to find, if not the imprint of a horseshoe, then at least a bruise of some sort slowly materialising like a Polaroid. But there was nothing. Torn muscle. Has to be.
As I was due at Bells Beach for the next two days, to supervise the shooting of scenes for the upcoming series of The Librarians, there was no time to see a doctor. And besides, it’d probably settle down in a couple of days. That’s what Dr Hulme reckoned and he was in The Matrix.
At seven o’clock the next morning, after a sleep-free night in a Torquay hotel, I found myself shivering in a frozen Portaloo atop a windswept coastal cliff, while the production nurse, reaching beneath my seven layers of clothing, attempted to slather my back with Deep Heat. This, and a fistful of Voltarens, was going to help me get through the morning’s scenes (including the climax of the entire series), without falling to the ground and howling skywards Charlton Heston style. ‘What’s wrong?’ asked an alarmed Wayne Hope, his (fake) ponytail flapping in the Antarctic breeze. ‘Torn muscle,’ I replied. ‘Has to be.’
By the weekend, certain activities were proving difficult. Breathing in, for example. If I laughed or coughed, it was like being electrocuted. A single sneeze nearly killed me. With no other actors available to advise me, I finally decided to seek professional medical advice. As my doctor doesn’t work Sundays, I booked myself in with the bloke who mans my local after-hours medical centre. I’d seen this dead ringer for Rumpole creator John Mortimer about something a few months earlier and, having been informed of my genetic blood disorder, he had startled me with these three words:
‘Hetero or homo?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Which are you?’
Apparently this was his way of discovering whether I had plans to pass my defective DNA on to a new generation.
‘Well, I’m not planning to have any children.’
No response.
‘Although I’m not…’
From his face, and from his earlier reaction to my job description, I could see that he thought I most definitely was.
He doesn’t appear to remember me from that visit, and seems more impressed with me this time. My story of drunken foolishness amuses him and, I assume, makes me seem more ‘hetero’. He shakes the smile from his face and hands me a form for an X-ray, ‘although you’ve probably just pulled a muscle’. Of course I have. I could have told you that myself.
The morning after the X-ray, nine mornings after the…whatever it was, I’m summoned back to the medical centre. Dr Mortimer’s weekday counterpart, a female doctor with the bedside manner of R Lee Ermey in Full Metal Jacket, is not remotely amused by anything in my sorry story. ‘You’ve got one, possibly two broken ribs,’ she tells me. ‘With up to four displaced fractures. Tell me again how it happened.’ I reiterate that I have no idea. ‘So then, tell me about your drinking problem,’ she says, without looking up.
‘Drinking problem? No, this hardly ever happens. I’m not really much of a drinker at all.’
I realise she’s looking at me with a ‘yeah, right’ face, like this is a response she hears every day. But she’s wrong about me. I’m not like those others. I’m Spartacus.
As you may know, there’s nothing you can do about broken ribs except wait and not reach for high shelves. Six weeks is the standard recovery period. Six weeks before the pain and the jokes stop. Before people stop looking at me like that doctor. Like it’s not the ribs that are the problem, but the continual alcoholic blackouts that I’m clearly in denial about.
But, as I told her, this lapse into unconsciousness has happened maybe nine times in forty-six years. And I don’t think I’m going to go for a tenth. Not knowing what happened and thinking about how much worse it could have been are the main incentives. People keep reminding me how William Holden died, which should give you an idea of the sort of people I’ve been hanging out with. One of them has suggested I see a hypnotist to try to piece together what happened that night, and I may just do it. I wonder if Martin St James is in the phone book?
Perhaps the seatbelt in the cab did it somehow. I could have fallen against a planter pot. Or onto my own elbow. Or maybe, just maybe, I was attacked by the cab driver. Who knows what I may have been saying on the trip home that Sunday morning? I picture him pummelling me on the footpath outside my house. ‘Mate, I don’t give a flying fuck about correct aspect ratios!’ he screams. ‘Nobody does!’
Tony Martin is the Melbourne-based author of ‘A Nest of Occasionals’ and ‘Lolly Scramble’. Podcasts of his radio show ‘Get This’ are still available for free download at iTunes (type in: ‘Get This: Richard Marsland Lives’). Most recently, he directed new episodes of ‘The Librarians’, which returns to ABC1 on October 13.
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