The Heart of Saturday Night

After recreating the entire collected works of Leo Tolstoy in my last post, I’ve been tempted not to hit you guys again with another bout of loquacious blathering so soon, but I’m sort of bored and I have pictures from last night I gotta use up eventually.

Saturday night came sloping in late, like it was just putting in a reluctant appearance at a photo op. Everyone in the world was going to the International Gasque (formal dinner) at Stockholms Nation, except for me who a) forgot about it and b) didn’t have the money for the ticket. I spent most of the early evening deliberating on whether or not I wanted to show up to the afterparty, which I knew would cost about ten bucks, not including drinks, would involve the long trek into town and back, and would probably result in not picking up any women at all. I asked Tom Waits what he would do, and he said he would totally go. Then he told a crazy story about driving a girl home in reverse on the Pasadena highway or something.
Anyway, I pulled up anchor at about 8:30, ditching three IM conversations and an online Scrabble game, when Emma came running into my room, grabbed me by the ears, and dragged me across the hall to where Tjis, the Dutchman she’s fucking, was busy turning twenty-seven. I talked to three neurobiology students from Cameroon and met this great German couple who invited me to have a threesome with them. They were both sufficiently good looking that I admit I was tempted, till it occurred to me that their definition of “threesome” and mine may not be the same, since my definition is “the guy cooks some really great food in the other room while I have sex with his girlfriend.” They knew some pretty good jokes, though, and had a line on a good Chinese joint in town off of Stora Torget.
We drank and sang and at 10:00 we went out onto the balcony and screamed like imams calling the inebriated faithful to their prayers and libations. I parted ways with them around 11 or so when they headed out to a bar by the river and I, ever a slave to democracy, caught the bus to Stockholms. I was already four sheets to the wind by then, muttering “Tom Traubert’s Blues,” my suit rumpled, my hat barely on, but my flask was full and I felt vaguely optimistic.
I rather hate Stockholms Nation, and so does everybody else I know. It has a sort of snobby air of pretension and actually has two dance floors, which I find excessive.
The party there was fairly unremarkable. I spent some time talking and flirting with Caroline (the omnilingual German mentioned some time ago, and the blonde pictured here) who I’m having lunch with sometime this week. My bastardly trick of using Japanese words and saying they’re just English words she didn’t know seemed to work—it has yet to let me down.


Spent some time saying hello to various people, explaining my strip club idea at some length, and talking to Martin’s tall, long-shouting friend whose name I will never learn. Spent more time failing to pick up women and avoiding Sarah, who was probably succeeding to pick up men. Around 2:00 I was swimming through the dance floor, which was so swathed in smoke that you literally couldn’t see who you were bumping, let alone grinding. Somewhere in the middle of that sweating, stinking, undulating morass of hormonal humanity, smack in the center of the most crowded dance floor in Scandinavia, I came upon Loufer, sitting down comfortably in a chair and having a beer.


Next to him was the Canadian I saved last Friday, wearing a red velvet sport coat, which seemed about right.

And then I noticed Jim, the American I saved the Canadian from. He didn’t look happy to see me. He dragged out a fist about the size of a mortuary and set about trying to hit me with it. If you look in the picture of Loufer sitting down, you can see it.

I, however, being schooled and experienced in the processes of peace and conflict resolution, pointed out that since we were both wearing exactly the same hat, thereby expressing the essential universality of all humanity, to attack me would in fact be to attack himself, he relented. Also, there were really big bouncers around.
They threw us all out sometime after 2:30 and we boiled into the sloping cobblestone streets like human steam, the weakest of us melting away into the night. By then I’d met up with Aisling (inexplicably pronounced “Ashton”) who is Loufer’s friend and the Irish girl who fell in the river in a post about a month ago. She’s a big Beat generation fan, so we talk a lot of Kerouac and Beckett and Ezra Pound and so forth. She had a friend with her from Dublin named Claire who I fell in love with immediately.

We encountered a Scotsman on the hill past the cathedral, and tried to decipher his strange moon-language.

On the long cemetery road, where the drunken international students streamed like overdressed refugees fleeing a strange alien war, we stopped at the world’s slowest hot dog stand. The wind had picked up by then, making long speeches through the branches and the gravestones. It was the sort of broken Saturday night that nobody'd gotten around to fixing yet, and I couldn't remember why I'd decided to come out in the first place.


We were there over an hour. Many of us got desperate and began to scavenge. I saw a man in an Italian silk suit with a good tie and a matching handkerchief eat a chunk of leftover pizza he found in the street.

Martin turned up there, which I guess made as much sense as anything else. He’d been playing a gig at Norrlands, apparently wielding an instrument he’d never played before. I talked to him while the wily Canadian paired up with Claire and after another hour or so of walking, we made it back to Flogsta. Martin went home, as did the Canadian, which I thought put me in the clear. Right civil of him.
Loufer was having an after-afterparty in his room, which turned out to be less of a den of hedonism and debauchery than I was hoping. He’s got a lot of books, though, which I’m jealous of, and a hell of a good music collection. He had an ugly friend there who was smoking the only dope in all of Sweden and listening to a slow, Leonard Cohen-y rendition of “Fever.” I sat on the bed, trying to think of how to proposition Claire without tipping of Aisling, who I think likes me and has a good hat. The Scotsman burst in, his kilt billowing, and seized up some sort of metal instrument, which he began to pound with a stick.

Loufer, not to be outdone, produced a giant bongo drum and began to pound it horribly, shouting Bukowski and mystical Sufi poems, perhaps in an effort to exorcise this plainly evil Scottish spirit which had infested his room.

It was to no avail, though. I made a half-hearted pass at Claire, and she declined, so I got out of there, surfing a bit on the contact high, and standing ankle-deep in peanuts in the elevator. I guess someone spilled a five-kilo bag of them in there. On the way home I saw a bicycle on top of a phone booth, and took a picture so you guys would believe me.