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Some day I will write a book about this time in my life. When I just got out of college I was working as a reporter for a TV station and bartending at a bar that was owned by a bunch of Italian guys, who also were in the news a lot.
It was a funny coincidence. As a reporter I was making below the minimum wage and needed another job. The only job I could find was as a bartender and this particular place paid great tips and was very discreet in who worked there and what went on.
It was a classy joint, but every once in a while things would go all bananas and as a bartender/bouncer, it was part of my job to mix it up and keep things under control.
Now, this is a little known secret about DAD, I am a big dude, I pack a punch, but I am also waaayyy too pretty to get hit in the face. I hate fighting. It hurts like hell, and I like my nose and ears the size they are.
When things got nuts in the bar, I would use my size to intimidate people into thinking straight. If fists flew, I carried mace in my pocket and would blast the knuckleheads with a squirt of the good stuff, grab them and toss them out the door. Civilized.
One slow night, I was waxing fantastic with the owner and some of the waitresses, we were as they say “busting balls” about this thing and that. I’m not sure what I was saying at the time, but I was going on about how great I was about “something.” I reached down below the bar and grabbed what I thought was breath freshener , took a pause in my blabbering and squirted three big blasts of breath freshener into my mouth.
From the title of this post, you know, it wasn’t breath freshener. It was in fact mace. The stuff works fast, really fast! As I fell to my knees screaming and gagging, my co-workers had no idea what was happening. I tossed the container to the owner, after about three seconds, she “got it.”
As would expect in an emergency situation where someone could potentially be dying, she busted out in hysterical laughing! Then she did the next logical thing, she passed it around to the rest of the people we were talking to, and they began to laugh.
While I was washing my mouth out with cold water and sobbing, the owner of the club did in fact walk over to the phone and call poison control. The conversation went like this.
Owner– I am calling from Club XYZ and we have an incident of someone making themselves in the mouth several times.
Silence-
Owner– Laughing harder than ever before. Gasping for air, “They want to know the age of the child that did this.” More laughing. She replied “he’s 24.”
Owner– “Now they are laughing!”
Everyone in the bar lost it at this point and I was left along with my burning mouth.
When everything calmed down, what I was doing was the right thing, chewing on ice and flushing my mouth out over again. Poison control talked me thought what needed to be done.
While I felt awful, a few hours later I was ok.
The insane moral of this story for parents is, always have emergency numbers handy. I still have no idea why we had the poison control number on the wall, but I was glad we did.
Lesson #2, kids at any age can get into trouble at the blink of an eye. I am super paranoid about making sure all of our poisonous chemicals are locked up and out of reach and everything is clearly labeled.
Accidents happen all the time, yes, a can of mace can feel exactly like breath freshener when you are not really paying attention.
My friends from Club XYZ are on Facebook and are always there to remind me of that faithful day, but every time I go to the store or put something on a shelf, it is there in the back of my head, from shoe polish to laundry detergent, a mouthful is all it takes and the ending may not be as funny.
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