Did I ever tell you about the time I watched a Guinness Beer truck back over and kill a man? No? Oh, well then lets get this party started!

A long time ago, when I was young and hip and very cool and hip and young (you get it), some friends and I jumped in my car and drove three hours up to the 9:30 Club in Washington D.C. to watch a punk band called Face to Face play live, which I really still love to this day. We got up there early in the day to get tickets and visit our favorite museum - The Walter Reed Medical Museum, or as we liked to call it “The Deformed Baby Museum” - where everything in there is real and chillin in a jar of formaldehyde.

Anyways, it took us forever to find a damn parking spot outside of the club when we got there, but we finally did and we went to the ticket window to purchase our tickets for the evening. Once that was done we were off for a day of fun. There was a huge Guinness Beer truck double-parked in front of the 9:30 Club, which I am pretty sure was there to deliver beer to the club. A guy that needed to run into a store real quick decided to double park his car too and he walked behind the Guinness truck. The Guinness truck had just started up and was already backing up to try and inch it’s way back out into traffic. Now this is a HUGE truck and it is backing up at a rate of MAYBE 2 miles per hour and making that godawful annoying beeping noise as it is doing so and somehow, this guy did not see the truck and did not hear the beeping RIGHT NEXT TO HIM! In a matter of seconds, the truck hit the guy and knocked him down so that his head was perfectly aligned with the tires. Then everything seemed to move in slow motion like out of the Matrix - you saw the truck go up and down like it had backed over a speed bump and you heard people screaming from all directions to the driver to STOP!!! He had no clue what he had done and the back part of this truck was not fully attached to the front, so he did not feel any impact either.

It was too late. He had run over the guy! It all happened in a blink of an eye and it happened 5’ in front of us - WE.WERE.IN.SHOCK! The guy’s head was flat and there was blood coming out of his ears, so it was pretty obvious that he was killed immediately. The driver was inconconsoleable - he was crying hysterically, and the guys wife, who had been in the car and watched the whole thing happen was in the same state. 

We stood there, still in shock until the ambulance and police left.  We were kind of confused on how we were supposed to feel at that point.  I mean, we drove three hours to have fun, but we ended up watching someone die right in front of us - what do we do?  We seriously had this conversation…What do we do?  Are we horrible people if we go on about our day like nothing happened, like we did not just watch someone’s life end in front of us?  That conversation lasted mmmm, about 4 minutes (because we were young, insensitive assholes) and we hopped into the car to go see more messed up crap at the Museum.  We came back to the site of the now infamous “Guinness Killing” later that night for our show - and had a blast!

Moral of the Story:  If you see a Guinness Beer truck on the street, RUN - DO NOT WALK, as far as you can from the truck.  Guinness Beer truck drivers are specially skilled killing animals!!!