THE DAMAGE DONE by Barry Miller

It was a cold, snowy, winters, Friday night in February. I was fifteen years old and belonged to a high school fraternity. It was basically a group of friends who formed this frat. They named it Phi Lamda Omicron, which we called PLO. The irony was we were mostly Jewish and the infamous PLO was not even born yet.

Stuart Gross called me and told me there was a party at the frat house with a girls sorority of really nice looking girls. My parents didn’t like me going there so I told them I was meeting Stuart to play cards at his grandmother’s house. We met up at the subway train and went to Boro Park to party at the frat house.

I remember I was wearing my black and gold horizontal striped boat neck sweater. It was a favorite of mine and thought it would help make a good impression meeting a girl. Well I did. I met this very attractive, smart and funny fourteen year old. We were sitting on a couch just to the left of the front door which was about six steps down from ground level to this basement apartment.

We were talking, laughing and making out. I was giving her pointers on how to French kiss. The red lights filled the room with a soft sensual glow when all of a sudden the door flew open and a gang of guys spilled into the room with bricks, car aerials, and blackjacks. They were jumping on and pummeling anyone in sight. There was a slight warning because the first person in yelled “I’ll give you three seconds to get out of here!” That only lasted two seconds before the fighting started.

I took the hand of the girl I was with and since I was near the door I pushed her out, up the steps to protect her. I followed right behind until I felt a hard object like a brick hit me in the head. I fell on the steps holding my head and crawled up to street level where I saw what looked like a scene from West Side Story.

There I was laying in a fetal position in the snow holding my head watching this “gang war” when my friends came and picked me up and began to remove me from this awful scene. I heard them say “Let’s get him out of here before he gets killed!” As they carried me over there shoulders in a standing position down the block I felt something wet on my neck. I looked at my hand and it was covered with blood. Hey took me to the frat house of the football team which happened to be in the basement of one of the cheerleaders. She went upstairs to get her parents. I obviously had a very badly smashed skull and was bleeding profusely.

The parents took me to the emergency room. When I got to the hospital the only other person who got hurt was Stuart Gross who was there holding his head. Boy, the irony! Stuart was already sixteen so they brought him in to stitch him up. Being that I was only fifteen my parents would have to be present. So I sat there in excruciating pain, holding my head, bleeding, waiting for my parents.

I look up and see my dad in one of his very angry attitudes lunging towards me yelling “Wait till I get my hands on you!” My mother literally holding him back screaming “Leave him alone, look what’s happened to him!”

As soon as the release papers were signed I was brought into a room where I received nine stitches with no Novocain sewing my skull back together. It really hurt. The doctor said I was really lucky because it was right next to my soft spot and I could have easily been killed. I guess if I went to play cards all this damage would not have happened.