News flash: You can actually injure yourself trying to make a vine.
About two years ago during my senior year of high school, I learned that the hard way.
It was a crisp October morning in Miami. As the sun began to rise, birds sang to the tune Drake’s “Hold On, We’re Going Home.” I watched as some of my high school baseball teammates shoved past the rest of us into the locker room toward the freezing showers. Quite frankly, nobody wanted to smell like dog doo-doo after a sweaty, testosterone drenched workout in the weight room. After a long wait, I finally showered, all the while shouting obscenities at the guys and going over information for my AP Biology exam. I was a rare breed of both nerd and jock. A mutt, if you will.
As I stepped out of the shower, preparing to gussy up for the day and look like a fly superstar, I heard some of my teammates laughing in the corner. They were on Vine, the new super cool social media platform that took high school by storm. There they stood, watching some random guy jump in the air and basically sex up his bed to the tune of some atrocious song. How dumb. Who would be stupid enough to actually do that?
“Hey, Cordoves, we should make a Vine of you doing the grind on me,” one of my teammates yelled. It might be time to tell you that I was low-key abysmal at baseball and considered the jokester of the team.
What? I thought. Come on, we’re a little too mature to actually do something as idiotic as—
“Or are you too much of a chicken sh*t to do it?” he finished.
Oh, hell nah.
Let me clue you in on a very well kept secret: Men are stupid. Put one man in a room and he’s a reasonable, enjoyable guy. Put a group of men in a room, and World War III ensues. If a man challenges another to a display of male dominance, we can’t just back out. We must immediately accept the challenge to prove our alpha male status. If our friend says, “Bro, you can’t finish that burrito,” we’ll wolf that thing down in seconds. If our friend says, “Jump the Grand Canyon riding a unicycle,” we’ll go Evil Knievel on his ass.
So when my teammate challenged me with a dumb dance I had literally seen once in my entire life, I couldn’t resist the opportunity. Mind you, I was still half naked and soaking wet from my shower.
I positioned myself, ready to hit the hardest “Grind On Me” the world had ever witnessed. The team gathered in a ring around me, ready to watch greatness occur. “Greatness” in this case equated to a soaking wet kid in his boxers partaking in a ridiculous dance.
Just as they started the music, another teammate exclaimed at the top of his lungs, “Dude, you might slip on the concrete, put a towel underneath!” I was impressed that someone actually thought about my well being in that moment.
They placed the towel at my feet. The music began to play, and I jumped the air. I immediately placed my hands on the ground and got into a handstand, ready to fall back towards the ground and start a sensual, yet incredibly awkward, gyrating motion.
Instead of falling back to the ground the way I came up, my legs didn’t stop. I tipped forward as if about to complete an intricate somersault, my body forming an upside down “J” in the air. I was suspended for what felt like hours until I heard a loud crack. I tumbled to the ground, creating a shockwave more powerful than an atom bomb striking earth’s surface.
There I lied on the ground, confused as hell. My right arm was somehow stuck behind my head. I tried pulling it, and as it finally slipped out, I watched my once strong arm flop around in front of my eyes before slapping on the cold cement floor. It took a few minutes to register, but I finally realized that my arm had broken in two.
Then, I screamed. I screamed so many obscenities that if I put them all down I’d probably be fired or asked to write a completely different story. My dripping wet and half-naked body convulsed on the ground (not a pretty image if you ask me).
As my adrenaline started to subside, my coach along with several deans came to find out what occurred. To hide from embarrassment and the inevitable reaming I’d get from the coach, we lied and told him I simply slipped on the slimy locker room ground.
The paramedics quickly arrived. Two chiseled boulders of men standing somewhere at 6’5 walked in. After examining my broken arm, they looked at one another before finally openly saying, “He’s a pretty bulky dude, and the way his arm is broken he’ll have to get up on his own.”
Watching me get up on my own was like watching a turtle on its back trying to roll over: Hilarious if you’re the one watching, but totally sucks if you’re the turtle. Later on, as I would discover through countless X-rays and a not-so-fun surgery, my humerus snapped clean in half. For my non-Biology majors out there, that’s your upper arm bone. It’s also one of the strongest bones in the whole human skeleton, and I managed to break it in half like a karate master breaking a cinderblock.
Because I did it for the Vine, I now bear a nine-inch scar on my arm, and a metal plate holds my arm bone together. I also forced my parents to pay for the hospital expenses, and I can’t play baseball ever again. I won’t lie to you, it’s a great conversation starter and suckers always feel bad for me, but to tell you the truth, it really wasn’t worth it.
So when your friends tell you to do a backflip off a chair for the Vine, flip them the bird and walk away. Okay seriously, though, is Vine even still a thing?
