Here is what it looks like to be hit in the face with a pint glass:
You wouldn’t think it by hearing this story or seeing my picture, but I am a pretty lucky bastard.
It all started last night. I had just returned to Beijing from a month holiday in America, so naturally my friends here wanted to go out and enjoy the evening with me. We were sitting at the bar having a beer when a couple of Chinese guys started trying to push their way up to the front of the bar. One of my friends, being a lead guitarist in a band and all, refuses to have any kind of threat perpetrated on his perceived sense of manhood, so he mouths off to the guys. They get up in each other’s faces.
Now, I think I generally try to live my life as a decent human being. I work hard, I try to help my friends when they need it, I try not to fault other people for their own imperfections, at least not to their face. I’m not perfect; nobody is, but I must have had some pretty bad karma coming from somewhere. I step in between my friend and the other guy to try to call them down. Two seconds later, my entire world is spinning and people are screaming everywhere. I realize I just got hot in the face with a glass. I’m still in shock at this point, and the only thing I can think is “open your eyes, can you still see?” Luckily I can, but blood is just pouring off my face at this point. My friend grabs me and takes me downstairs to try to get to the hospital, but there are more guys waiting for us downstairs. They grab me, throw me to the ground and start kicking my face. My friend manages to drag me back up and take me back inside to wait for the police.
All in all, I was pretty lucky The glass hit me on the side of the forehead, so the other bruises were just from getting kicked. I don’t have a broken nose, I can see, and all my teeth are still there. Should I have stepped in the middle of those two? I guess not, in hindsight. But I don’t think it deserved this reaction. Moral of the story? I don’t really know. I guess I could try to avoid these kinds of situations. Stop drinking, don’t go to bars…that would probably help. But where does it stop? I can’t shelted myself completely from life. Shit just happens, I guess. Just cross your fingers that it doesn’t happen to you!
Holy shit man. Did you get any x-rays to make sure you didn’t have any skull fractures or internal hemorrhaging?
Glad to see you’re relatively ok. Did they arrest the guys who did this to you? How many people were there? Did they follow you downstairs or were people waiting for you? Does anyone know where the glass came from? Did your friends get in a fight after you got smashed?
His friend owes him nothing. He didn’t ask him to jump in at any point and he didn’t make the group of violent guys respond the way they did.
Zepp just probably shouldn’t have tried to interfere with the fight. If one of my friends tried to interfere with one of my fights, I’d probably forget the guy I was originally pissed at and go after my friend for trying to save the bastard from me.
Zepp probably should’ve just let his friend get what was coming for being stupid enough to pick a fight with them. The fact that he didn’t doesn’t mean his friend owes him anything.
Sucks for you Zepp, that shit looks pretty bad. Still, like you said, you got lucky. Could’ve been a hell of a lot worse if you hadn’t been gotten out quickly.
Taking shots for your friend teaches him that he can get away with doing the stupid shit he did because you’ll always be there to save him.
If Zepp was really nice he would’ve let his friend learn the hard way why not to fuck with hostile gangs.
Kero’s right, the guy’s a douche. Zepp shouldn’t be taking shit for him either way. Benevolence isn’t always the answer. His friend needs to be slapped by the harsh hand of reality. Hard.
But is that what it looked like to the other guys? Zepp’s been around, he knew there were risks and he took them. And now he has some painful cuts and bruises on his face for no reason imo.
Anyway, what I’m saying is his friend owes him nothing. Zepp’s reward for stepping in to save his friend is a safe friend. The deal is done.
That said, I think it was bad deal for everyone. No one’s better because of what he did. Zepp got thrashed so his friend would miss out on a well-deserved reality call via ass-kicking. That’s not right imo.
Or maybe his buddy DID take something away from this experience. But I doubt it.
To start with, Hades is partially right, even if he sounds like a bit of a douche saying it. I would never use this incident to say to my friend “you owe me.” I did willfully make the choice to step into the middle. Unfortunately, there was probably going to be a fight anyway, and then I’d have to jump in anyway on behalf of my friend. I guess it’s at least worth the effort to try and stop it. On the other hand, if my friend had said afterwards “well, you made your own decision and it doesn’t effect our friendship in the least,” then yeah, I’d probably not want to be friends anymore with him. As it was though, the guy drove me '(well, his girlfriend drove because he was too drunk) to two different hospitals and waited for my ass until 5AM to get all my stitches done. And I’m not going to stop being friends with him either. I was of course exaggerating a bit for effect in describing his personality. He does have a big mouth, but that just usually leads to meeting tons of interesting people, not fighting.
Heh, I don’t have any skull fractures. I actually lied a bit, most of the damage on my face was due to a few well-placed kicks to the face. The guy actually just sort of side-swiped my forehead with the glass, which is what I meant when I was really lucky. A couple of inches in a few different directions and I might not be writing this now.
Edit: To answer the rest of your questions I forgot…No, they did not arrest the guys. Police here generally don’t do much in fights except try to break them up. As for how many people, there were four of them in the bar, and a couple outside. I’m pretty sure they went down before me, but that part of the fight is a bit blurry. As for where the glass came from, probably the beer the guy was drinking at the time. He certainly seemed awfully ready to use the glass though, leading me to believe they were probably just waiting for any excuse to get the brawl started. And yes, the rest of my friends did try to get involved, but it was over pretty quickly, and we were handily outnumbered.
I can say from experience that falling face-first onto the floor will have similar effects to the glass-smashing and kicking zepp described. I’m relieved that no teeth or bones were damaged; I had to get a chipped tooth sanded, but I didn’t get stitches.
That sucks for you, man. :\ Glad nothing worse happened.
Just posting a small little update to the story. Another friend of mine who was at the bar that night (and didn’t join in the fight, the pussy!) informed me tonight that I was hit by a cocktail glass, not a pint glass, which would probably explain why I’m still alive. We also counted the number of stitches in my face at 22. Not too bad I guess for a 4 or 5 on 1 fight.
Yeah, that makes more sense. I was thinking getting hit with a pint glass may not even break the thing, since they’re pretty thick. It would be more like getting hit with a brick. Or if it was slammed hard enough to break, yeah you’d probably be dead.
