itsachat Writers Ave

Today my husband Stig and I watched the show ‘Steve-O’s Demise and Rise’ which is the story of a member of the Jackass crew being addicted to drugs and alcohol, hitting rock bottom and then getting sober. Prommie had told me it was worth a watch and she was so right, if you haven’t seen it yet give it a view. Seeing the show reminded Stig of his own Steve-O story. Stig and his mates at University were Jackass fans, they were loyal viewers of the Jackass show, had seen the Jackass movie and Stig had the ‘Don’t Try This At Home’ DVD. They each had several stories of how they had injured themselves trying to do Jackass style stunts, the one about the time “that knob-head Dave tried to jump five stacked up patio chairs on a skateboard and landed on his nuts while his glasses skittered down a drain hole” is a favorite. Outside the Hard Rock club they frequented there were boards that advertised who was appearing each week and when they saw that Steve-O was scheduled to be there they were stoked! They all bought tickets in advance and their bud Powelly rode two hours to go with them. Powelly wasn’t at University with them because he was a bit of a drop out, he was into motorcycles and had a job at a bike shop back home.

The night of the show the venue was sold out with the max capacity of 2,500 people packed shoulder to shoulder on the top floor of the club. There was no opening act, Steve-O came out immediately with Party Boy, Ryan Dunn and Preston. Stig “thinks” wee man was there but he can’t remember for sure, their crew had smoked quite a bit of hydro before heading to the show so it’s no big surprise that he can’t recall. He does remember the part where Party Boy stapled Steve-O’s left nut to his left thigh, his right nut to his right thigh and his cock to his stomach. He remembers the part in the show where Steve-O does the tequila stunt, snorting salt off his hand, slamming a shot of tequila then squeezing a wedge of lime into his eye. He remembers Party Boy doing his trademark dance and the crew torturing the fat guy Preston and lots of puking as usual. He remembers the crowd being totally wild with ear shattering chants of “DO IT DO IT” that would turn to clenched teeth groans at the thought of the pain being endured on stage. The collective “GAAAHHHH!!!” as the crowd would look away in simultaneous shock and horror when something particularly heinous occured. But the most exciting part of the show for Stig was not actually anything that was happening on stage, it was when Powelly passed out while standing right next to him.

On stage Steve-O had just taken a light bulb and held it by the silver base up against his head while somebody else smashed it with a hammer. He then took the broken bulb and jammed the glass shards into his tongue and twisted it, then with blood running down his chin he chewed up the broken glass and ate it while grinning insanely and laughing the whole time. Because they were packed in so close together Stig could tell immediately when Powelly’s legs gave out and as Powelly was slumping towards the floor Stig yelled at the guy standing on the other side of him “Grab him!” They each put one of his arms around their neck and supported him human crutch style with his feet dragging on the floor “like a dead guy’s” as they made their way through the crowd to the exit. The two of them managed to get him down the stairs while slapping his face as he was fading in and out. Stig said “His face was white as a sheet and his lips were purple. He was huffing and puffing, he couldn’t breathe right. He was fully messed up! Powelly was a big lad, as big as me, I had never seen him this way, none of the times we had been out drinking or smoking, I was really worried about him.” When they got to the bottom of the stairs this guy standing in the hall said “Hey, is he one of the ones that’s passing out?” The guy motioned for them to follow him into a room where there were about forty or fifty people, most of them in groups of three with two friends trying to wake up a third that had passed out.

Once Powelly had come to his senses and could talk he explained how the light bulb being twisted in the tongue had sent him over the edge. They exchanged stories with some of the other people in the “fainting room” about what disgusting part of the act had done them in then went back upstairs to watch the rest of the show. There was about a half hour of sick stunts left and Stig said he and his pals started noticing that other people were dropping like flies, they would point them out to each other “Look, there goes another one up in the balcony! There went one over on the side!” Stig thinks the grand finale might have included fire eating or fire blowing, he is shaky on the details but dead certain that fire was involved. Afterward, they walked back to their friends Karen and Jo’s place who lived nearby (the two girls who smuggled weed out of Amsterdam in their bras, but that’s a different story) and fell asleep on mattresses on the floor. Stig says when he woke up he was being spooned by a man which was weird and “really odd”. He said nobody ever gave Powelly a hard time about the whole passing out thing because he was a favorite among the group and well respected. He stayed with them a couple of more days before riding his motorcycle back home.

Stig wound up his nostalgic tour with this retrospective, “Powelly never did come stay with us again after that. He ended up living in the pavilion on the cricket pitch for a while. In exchange for living there he promised to play for the local team so he didn’t have to pay rent. You could tell he was there if you saw his motorcycle parked outside, it was like a little house. They loved him down at the cricket club, he could have been a professional player if he hadn’t gone off on binges. He was an all-rounder who could both bat and bowl, even with a fried head Powelly was still their best player. They would come knocking on the pavillion door trying to wake him up on game days but he would be out of it. The club ended up getting fed up because he never played any games and kicked him out. He moved back with his Mum and Dad for a while and then with his girlfriend. The last time i saw him he was in possession of a gun that he had been given by a gangster who didn’t want to be caught holding it because it had been used in some sort of crime, the trigger bit was broken off though.” The story ends here for now because Stig began musing, thinking of his good chum Powelly and his University days while I came here to tell it to you .

        
        
        
        
        

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