Happy Hour at the Baja Beach Club
They were my glasses from college. For some reason - call it flamboyance or idiocy - I got them in frames of red gel, like Sally Jesse Raphael - and the prescription was possibly three years out of date. Underneath the right frame, the side of my face was swollen like an egg was lodged just a centimeter or so below the skin. My eye was bruised to a bizarre rainbow of black, blue, purple, red and yellow, like a piece of rotten meat attached to my skull. My lower lip was split enough that it hurt to smile. I had this perpetual headache on the left side of my brain. People avoided me on the street. I was a mess. But the glasses? They were the insult to my injurious face.
When Ali, Casey, and I were in college down in central Illinois, we lived in this great place just a block off campus. It was situated at the top of a hill overlooking the town smack dab in the middle of Greek Row, snuggled between the Beta and SAE houses—a modest, three-bedroom house with a front porch and back patio, and yard that made it ideal for barbecues and other themed or not themed parties.