The Chronicles of Ibam Shibam

Last night at around eleven o’clock, a friend of mine was hit by a car in Manhattan and rushed to a Mount Sinai emergency room. Another friend of mine got detained by the police for obstruction of justice. I can promise you that my friends are not the type to casually take part in this sort of dicey behavior. We’re typically a bunch of cowards. This was just one of those nights where shit decided to hit the fan and spray everyone stupid enough to be standing around it.

My friends and I go to school just outside New York City, and earlier this week it was our friend Haley’s twenty-first birthday. For the celebration, she decided to rent a massive trolley in which she and twenty-seven of her closest friends would ride around midtown, getting belligerent drunk on the way to and from multiple bars. Now, before I go any further, I must admit that there were many aspects of this night of debauchery that were not planned as well as they could’ve been. For starters, none of the four bars that we stopped at were given any sort of notice that a party bus was stopping by, and with it being a Friday night in Manhattan, it wasn’t exactly a cake walk getting our group into any respectable establishment. Secondly and more notably, once the trolley trip was over, we were simply dropped off and left in the middle of the city with no plan of action moving forward and little to no brain cells left to figure it out. And so, it was at this point that we became a group of twenty-seven sweaty children in almost-adult bodies, obnoxiously searching for the next place to wreak havoc. If you’re reading this and hate us, I don’t blame you. I honestly agree with you.

As we stood around like a bunch of mindless sardines, people started to depart in smaller groups of three, four, five people. The idea was to find somewhere locally to get a bite to eat before making plans to head back home. At least that was my plan. As the night began to unfold, it became clear that some of my more inebriated friends had other ideas for the direction in which our night was to go.

Comfortably seated at a high-top table at some unnamed sports bar, I begin to feel the drinks really start to take effect. I rest my head on the table and hear my roommate’s phone ringing. She picks it up, speaks for only a few moments, says thank you, and hangs up. “Nate just got hit by a car. An ambulance is taking him to the hospital. Cam got arrested. We need to go.” I can remember thinking it was funny just how good of a job she had done delivering the message with such blunt efficiency. There was little to no emotion, just a sobering urgency. I thought it was genuinely really funny. Then I processed the content of the words she had said. Then I sprinted outside in the direction of a trash can. Then I threw up.

We jogged uptown towards Mount Sinai Hospital while calling various friends and piecing together more and more of the story. Apparently, Nate was with three of our friends before he decided to jump into the back of an SUV with its hazards on; a car he confidently assumed was his Uber, despite the fact that he hadn’t called one. He was dropped off up the road, went to cross the street and got hit by a Toyota going ten to fifteen miles per hour. He was on Facetime with the friends he had ditched, and while falling backwards onto the cement he threw his phone onto the sidewalk, landing at the feet of a bystander who looked into the screen and calmly exclaimed, “Your friend just got hit by a car.”

The Facetime gang arrived at the scene around the same time as the cops did. Our friend Cam arrived first, and was somehow attentive enough to remember that Nate was carrying a fake ID. With multiple cops demanding that he give them the wallet he had just taken out of his unconscious friend’s pocket, Cam refused to hand it over. He also wouldn’t answer any questions, with the cops asking, “How old is your friend?” just to get an infuriatingly arrogant response, “Hell if I know, man.” I’m not saying that Cam deserved to be thrown to the ground, cuffed and brought into the precinct for questioning. If anything, I’m saying he’s kind of a badass.

Within fifteen minutes, there were nine New York City police officers that showed up alongside the ambulance to handle the gang of drunken brats. Nate was brought to the hospital and quickly sedated after coming-to and going absolutely berserk on one of the nurses. There’s not much record of what went on during his episode other than his undying refusal to tell them anything, even his name. When asked for it or any other piece of basic information, it was said that Nate would aggressively yell, “My name is Ibam Shibam!” That’s Ibam Shibam, an entirely fictional name pronounced E-Bomb She-Bomb. We don’t know where it came from. Neither does he. He doesn’t even remember saying it.

The larger group of us sat outside the hospital room waiting for more information for about thirty minutes, a time in which we were praying we’d be able to make jokes in the morning. Eventually we got word that Cam had already been released from the precinct (how he pulled this off, I still don’t know) and that Nate was awake and doing fine with no broken bones and no reason to stay for longer than that night. And after a solemn expression of gratitude, we hopped on the train to go home, making it back to our place at around three in the morning.

I woke up in a nauseous headachy haze, slowly trying to decipher which memories were real and which were fabricated throughout the morning. There were parts of the story of which I had very little recollection, and others that stood out in terrible clarity. The important thing to note, though, was that everyone was alive and well -- a fact that could have very well not been the case had a few things gone differently. I had always imagined coming to school in New York as this crazy time made up of close calls and blurry vision, but I always assumed that I was too bright, too mature to ever let myself get into a genuinely dangerous situation. Last night taught me and my friends that the city will eat you alive if you’re not too careful. That, and that Ibam Shibam will go down in history as one of the best drunken attempts at deception ever.