Auld Lang Pain

Five! Four! Three! Two! One!

We made it, folks. It’s a new day, a new year. It’s time to keep our resolutions for at least a month before diving back into gluttony. Time to step back, count our blessings. One of those blessings might be that you didn’t spend the morning hours of the year’s first day in the emergency room.

You see, friend, New Year’s Eve is a perilous night filled with amateur drinkers gulping SoCo and cranberry while shouting at top volume, “ONLY 35 MORE MINUTES! WOOOOOO!” They aren’t like you and me. They can’t handle their liquor. Hell, some of them have never had it before. Most nights you can avoid these geniuses by keeping your distance from wherever it is high schoolers throw parties, but on this night — if you leave the house — they will be part of your mix.

A main ingredient of that mix is alcohol-thinned blood. Personally, two of my last three NYEs have seen someone take the butt end of someone else’s ignorance.

Just minutes after ringing in 2003, a young man grabs his neck in pain by the backyard keg of the Cole twins’ annual NYE blowout (“Double Your Pleasure,” January 9, 2003). He’s just been shot with a high-powered BB gun by a prankster in an adjacent lot. Merry Friggin’ New Year!

This year, at an afterparty put on by the DJ collective Spinnin’ Kitties at downtown spot Thermal (1601 Commerce), a fight begins outside. It makes its way indoors and ends when an errant bottle is sent soaring across the room, only to break in a shattered mess across a doorman’s face. He’s dragged to the kitchen where he sprawls on top of towels, making them heavy with hemoglobin. Kitchen workers must step around his oozing dome to serve the breakfast buffet. The night — scheduled to end at 4 a.m. — is cut short by an hour when police and an ambulance arrive. The “special guest” band the club has already paid doesn’t get to play. Merry Friggin’ New Year!

Driving through the streets of downtown after leaving Thermal is akin to playing Frogger. Drunken bimbos in tiny black dresses dart out in front of cars, unconcerned with the meaning of traffic lights. Big meaty men stumble aimlessly through the streets like 90-pound sorority girls who’ve just had their first taste. I almost want to park and watch how many Versace shirts end up glued to perfect pecs by sticky platelets.

Instead, the next day I call the downtown police department and ask how many drunken revelers slept in holding pens rather than in their own comfy beds. The stats aren’t available yet, and eventually I’m directed to the crime statistics on HPD’s Web site. I notice that the records from the downtown beat are interesting. Whereas August through October 2004 saw an average of 16 aggravated assaults a month, the first of January saw fivebefore nine in the morning!

One of these assaults occurred at 12:15 a.m. Police log the time when they arrive on the scene. Given how difficult it is to navigate downtown’s party-rocked streets on a busy night — have you tried crossing Main at Prairie on a Saturday? — even for people with sirens, you’ve got to figure that some poor schlub got his face pummeled just as the ball dropped. Happy Merry Friggin’ New Year!

The violent end up in jail, and the violated end up in the hospital, or worse. This year, two local men were killed in the wee hours of New Year’s Day at separate parties.

Longtime nurse Vickie White has worked her fair share of NYE shifts (although fear of ridiculously stringent HIPPA laws prevents her from telling where). Now taking it easy in a Houston eye-care clinic, she once worked emergency rooms in New Orleans and says that staffing for NYE is like preparing for Mardi Gras: Everyone works.

“You have a ton of people who’ve had too much to drink and are sick. On top of that you have people that have been in car accidents or in drunken fights.” All that is par for the course, she says. “What we also see is an increase in suicide attempts. People get depressed and lonely during New Year’s. They see everyone else having fun, and it gets to them. We get it from all angles.”

The most horrific or strange thing she’s ever seen on the hallowed eve?

“That’s easy,” she says. “A married couple was at a party. The husband was dancing all night with someone that wasn’t his wife. His wife got angry, broke the flute off a champagne glass and stabbed him with the stem in the neck. She nicked his carotid. He was bleeding everywhere.”

Oh, yeah, I forgot to mention that you might be married to the amateur you need to protect yourself from. Stay safe, kids.