Blundering through Bristol, Part II

The club was called “Baja” and the Brits insisted on pronouncing it “Baa-jaah”. The Bristol waterfront is packed full of such places: interchangeable joints with artsy glowing signs, impatient bouncers, and more desperate, breathless, frantic young Britishers than I tend to like in one sitting. It was five quid to get in, another two for the coat check, and my usual (“Gimme a John Lee Hooker: a double of bourbon, a double of scotch, and a beer”) ran me about twelve quid. That’s only a little more than I’d pay here in Sweden, but for a complete stranger’s birthday party, I was getting a little bitter.

And of course there was dancing. I’ve spent a lot of time watching other people dance, and I’ve worked out certain theories. For instance, Rikka is one of those girls who dances primarily with her hands up over her head, undulating her body around in a tight circle. Women who do that are damaged in some way, every last one of them. Giles made a determined effort to get past his Caucasian male handicap and went for what I mentally refer to as the “closet homosexual” dance: elbows in close over the stomach, knees together, and lots of movement beyond those joints and a great deal of head-shaking. Looks quite like one of the kids on stage in the Charlie Brown Christmas special.

And a new guy showed up, whose name was Tom and who stood around smiling in a slightly bemused way, as though thinking, “My God, am I really this good-looking? I can hardly believe it myself.”

With his arrival, I began to postulate on the dynamics of the group in which I’d found myself. I have a habit of doing this. All the little glances, the expressions when they think nobody’s looking, the speech pattern that changes depending on the listener, the sense of connection…all of these tiny, minute details like threads in a tapestry, add up to form an indelible image, if only you can learn to step back far enough.

So I soon understood that Tom and Jodie had had something but didn’t any longer, more of her choosing than his. Giles wants Jodie, and Rikka wants Giles. Jodie (by now absolutely blasted and dancing so obscenely that somewhere far away, every member of the Black Eyed Peas blushed simultaneously, was having a jolly good time leading them both on.

And right then, I had one of those horrible moments when you realize that there is nothing interesting or surprising to be found here, that the lights and the music have turned to ashes all around and no longer serve to distract you from the dying stillness of the world and you look around at everyone else and see very clearly that you are the only one who realizes this and that no matter how hard you could ever try to explain it to them, they will neither grasp it or care enough to try. You feel you are a grim rock in that swaying, hopeless sea of thoughtless youngsters: something old and tired, constantly in danger of being whelmed beneath their incessant ecstatic tide. I had to get out of there. After all, as Shaw said, dancing is just a vertical expression of a horizontal desire, legalized by music. I had nothing to express in that place, so I ducked out, knowing I’d have two hours to kill before the club closed.

Bristol’s a bit of a dodgy town, and it gets very ugly very quickly as soon as you get away from the lights of the waterfront clubs. The whole place seems to be covered with jailhouse tattoos that scab off the old brick walls, littering the concrete with bits of paint, as though even what is done illicitly in Bristol is sure to fail. I passed a lot of little Indian places and a place called “New Hong Kong Fish Stop” and ducked into the first dive I found.

It was dark, it was ugly, I think Chuck E. Weiss was on the jukebox, and it smelled. It was called "Bucket o' Nails," and it was perfect.

I got a pint and sat at the bar, staring at it. The guy next to me asked me where I was from in an odd, mouth-full-of-wool sort of accent.
“I live in Sweden,” I said vaguely. I looked up at him, and was slightly surprised to see a flat, broad, Asian face looking back at me. “And yourself?”

He said his name was Kazultaka (or something like that, but you all know I never use people’s names when speaking to them unless I think they’re a bit stupid) and he claimed to be from Mongolia. Like you, I doubt the truth of this statement, but he knew that Ulaanbaatar means “Red Hero,” so maybe he was telling the truth. He certainly wasn’t Japanese or Southeast Asian, but he could have been some variety of Chinese…I hear it’s a pretty big place.

Anyway, we got to talking. He was in his late twenties and had been in the UK since he was a young boy. He said he’d been serving in the merchant marine for four years and took quite a bit of time to explain to me the difference between bulk cargo carriers and container carriers. He said he was certified up to 100,000 tonnes displacement, and bigger than that wasn’t worth the effort, because that’s the cap on ship sizes to get through the Panama Canal.
He was also a rugby union fan.

I explained the strange weekend I’d been having, told him about the party the next day, and when it was about time for me to head out, invited him along on the grounds that a) he probably wouldn’t show up and b) Jodie’d invited seventy-odd people on Facebook, so why not bring one more?

Maybe you can see where this is going. Maybe you can predict that after a drive through Bath to Bradford-on-Avon, I would discover the following:

Not a giant party boat packed full of gyrating Brits, but instead a long, narrow barge on the Avon river.

Not 70-odd young revelers ready to paint the night purple, but instead Jodie’s immediate family (including old ladies and tiny children) and six best friends ready to have a friendly afternoon cruise on the river.

And a very confused and awkward Mongolian merchant seaman.

Awkward.

So needless to say, we spent the next four hours hiding guiltily in the back corner of the little boat, clapping at the various birthday songs, pretending to beam proudly at the numerous tearful speeches, to pass the embarrassing baby pictures on to people who would recognize the babies in them, and generally to feel like the two biggest goddamn idiots in Christendom. Spent some time chatting with the father of Jodie’s younger brother’s girlfriend…interesting chap who runs a hotel in the south of Spain, which sounds like an excellent place. Also talked to Tom a bit, since it turned out (reading between the lines) there was an ugly breakup between him and Jodie a while earlier, so he was nearly as much of an outcast as us absolute strangers.

Eventually we retreated outside under the overhang on the bow of the barge with a couple bottles of champagne, to watch the gray, dreary English countryside ooze past. It had been raining all weekend, and I felt like that was appropriate.

It was downhill from there. Had a lengthy argument that evening with Jodie’s dad about Blanqui. Jodie crashed when we got back from the boat thing and woke up literally the instant everyone else decided to go to bed. They’d had me sleeping in the downstairs room (the dog’s room, if you must know…they were making me sleep in the basement with the dog…and I don’t blame them) which seemed to be the perfect acoustic place to be bombarded by the noise of Jodie banging about, talking to Giles, and watching MTV right upstairs. I’m not a great sleeping person anyway, especially when I know I have to be up in five hours (we were leaving in the morning, you see…flight was at 11, we figured on hitting rush hour on the M4, so we were leaving at 5) so eventually I gave up and went upstairs to find Giles desperately trying to get with Jodie and failing miserably. I’d passed my awkwardness point of no return by then, though, so I just sat on the couch, watching endless episodes of “Top Gear” till it was time to go sit in traffic for four or five hours.

So, in brief. I got drunk and made arrangements to fly to Bristol to crash a complete stranger’s small family birthday party with a Mongolian merchant seaman.

East of East St. Louis

Well, I was about five or six thousand miles east of East St. Louis and the wind was making speeches; the rain sounded like a round of applause. I leaned back against the bulkhead as the barge made its slow, sullen way down the Avon and passed the bottle of champagne to the Mongolian, who was named something along the lines of “Kazultaka”. I watched a little shop roll past: the chalk-written sign outside had said “Pasties with WOW FACTOR” but was bleeding onto the concrete.

You will not believe this story. I don’t entirely believe this story. You are all, I hope, aware that my life consists largely of an unceasing parade of the surreal, the bizarre, and the rationally objectionable. Mine often seems to be the lot of progressing through a world populated by assorted lunatics and grotesqueries desperately engaged in the unutterable nuances of their inexplicable lives: my purpose, it sometimes seems, is to catalogue it all with the utmost degree of peculiar exactitude. But even with that frame of reference, that intimate and recurring acquaintance with the really strange, this weekend may have been the most surreal experience of my life. The cake, my friends, has been taken.

It’s difficult to say exactly when it started. Technically, it began when I bought the tickets, but apparently that was at some point during the corridor party, about when I’d started chasing the entire bottle of Four Roses with tequila. That being the case, it may be more accurate to begin with the utter bewilderment that hit when I found the confirmation email from Ryanair a day or two later. Why am I flying to London? I wondered. What exactly have I agreed to?

I found the Facebook invitation not long after that. “It’s my 21^st”, the invitation read. “And I’m having a party on Sunday (25^th) afternoon and YOU are invited!!! Champagne, good food and a boat—wot more cud u ask for!!! We’ll also be heading out hitting Bristol nite life on Sat nite!!! There shall be plenty of drinking, and, unsurprisingly, plenty of dirty dancing (u know me!!)”

…I do?

The invitation was from Jodie, who I mentioned once in a post back in August and was pretty sure I hadn’t seen since. I vividly remembered sitting in a McDonald’s with her, listening to her tell a story about how her dad had found pictures on her phone of her having bondage sex with several guys. I remembered she went to school in Edinburgh and studied some sort of appallingly complex medical science stuff. I did not, and to this day do not remember what chain of events led to me agreeing to go to her 21^st birthday party in Bristol.

Nevertheless, I got an email Thursday afternoon instructing me to show up at the Uppsala train station at 10:40 Saturday morning with a sign with my name on it so that “Giles and Rikka” would know who I was. I recalled the words of Hunter S. Thompson, and decided I’d be a fool not to ride this crazy torpedo all the way to the end.

Unfortunately, Friday was in the way. I went out for drinks with a Swedish girl who’d clearly gotten tired of me already, and ended up at Västagöta nation, where some sort of harrowing German celebration was going on. There were all manner of blonde people standing on tables and benches, swaying madly and falling over, brandishing the sort of massive tankards of beer that once nearly led to the overthrow of a government. There was a live band, producing the tuba-heavy crime against music that Germans tend to try to spread across the world. There was an abundance of lederhosen. I had quite a few of those enormous mugs of Bavarian hefeweizen (how much do those things hold? A liter? It's like drinking from a wading pool, I tell you. EDITL: Turns out they hold 1.069 liters and are called Maß, which means "measure" in the Austro-Bavarian dialect) and wound up at an afterparty in Rackabergetsgatan with entirely too many Austrians.

Needless to say, I was not at my best when someone with an incredibly British accent reached down to where I was sitting slouched against the wall of the train station and asked if I was Winston Smith.

"Getting to be more so all the time," I answered.

"Well, I'm Giles Derrington," he said, thereby instantly winning the coveted "Most British Name Ever" award. "We're going to miss our train."

"Perfect."

There was a dark-haired Finnish girl with a spot-on Yorkshire accent with him: the embodiment of so many contradictions, my mind reeled and wished for more beer. She bundled the two of us onto a train to Stockholm, where we sat in the immense, echoing station, watching birds fly about inside. There was one spotlight welded onto the regular lighting assembly up in the corner, and it switched on at random, just in time to catch a janitor coming out of a men's room. He paused for a moment, and if he had broken into a rendition of "Let's Misbehave," it would have made about as much sense as anything else that happened.

Then it was a bus to Nyköping, where we were grilled going through customs. (Agent: "What do you study?" Me: "History." Him: "Swedish history?" Me: "Sometimes, yeah, I've had a few classes on it." Him: "How did Gustav Vasa escape the Stockholm Bloodbath?" Me:"Down a toilet, then skiied to Norway with one ski-pole." Him:"Okay, you can go through. Next!") There was a man on our flight with an entirely shaved head, a massive Frederick Engels-style beard, a Russian ushanka, only one glove and it with the fingers cut off, and a friend who brought his harpsichord (a type which Wikipedia informs me is, in fact, properly called a "zither") on the plane and played it almost the entire way. Giles kept rubbing his hands over his eyes and going "Oh God, what's going on? What's going on?"

We hit Stanstead in the pissing rain and carted our bags the ten thousand miles to the car rental place. Jodie, you see, had apparently insisted that we hire a car for the weekend on the grounds that it would be cheaper (it wasn't) and easier (also a filthy lie). Giles didn't have a license (this is why your empire crumbled) and there was no sodding way I was going to drive, so it was left to Rikka, who turned out to have certification as a commercial truck driver. We piled into a tiny black Peugeuot, equipped with a book of maps and an address, and set out for Bristol.

The trip took us about three hours, with a near-death experience fairly consistently every fifteen minutes or so. Giles called Jodie when we reached the edge of the city and asked where the hell we were going. She directed us to the Temple Meads train station, which is a massive affair apparently built in the 1870's. We piled out of the car and stood around in the drizzle, stomping our feet, watching our breath, and hating the world. Jodie showed up after a few minutes, sprinting across a busy street and tackling Giles. She spewed words through the filter of her thick Bristol accent, plainly hyped up on Red Bull and Attention Deficit Disorder:

"Gilessogreattoseeyouhowwasyourjourney, oh look, a man in a dress! I'vebeeneversostressedgottogetbloodypissedtonight, RIKKAomigod, erm, hello. Who are you?"

"I really haven't the foggiest," I said. "But I'm quite certain you invited me."

She wasn't listening anymore, though, and was babbling away ecstatically to her friends. She hopped into the car with us and directed us on a harrowing whistlestop blitz through Bristol to her house at the top of a huge hill overlooking the city. It was quite a large house and had quite a good view, and was absolutely stuffed to the gills with drunken Brits. Most of them were her family, who turned out to be former commune-dwellers, the sort of bitter, hardcore, old-school communists who are all too pleased to educate you on just how screwed you reallly are, but who you are rather surprised and annoyed to find are quite rich. They assaulted us with trays of lasagne, beer, wine, salads, lemon tarts, vodka and Red Bull, and an artillery barrage of drunken exclamations. Jodie ran up and down narrow stairs, forgetting what she'd gone places for, and her mother kept appearing from out of various doors, asking if we needed anything else. There were two other of Jodie's friends there: a scrawny girl named Olive and her boyfriend, whose name I never learned, but who had a short-on-sides/tall-on-top haircut that reminded me of the look cartoonists use when they want to portray a bird-person.

"Who are you?" he kept asking me. "Seriously. Who the hell are you?"

"I met Giles this morning at a train station in Sweden. He asked me if I wanted to go to a birthday party, and here I am."

At midnight, Jodie was ready, so we called cabs and raced off into the rather dodgy Bristol night, headed for clubs on the waterfront. And here, I suspect, is a good stopping place, since I've been writing this for quite a long time, and I'd really rather go have a sandwich. More later, kids.

The End of Nights

I stepped outside yesterday into a world gone mad. As though bled into by some hellish demon, the sky had turned a strange color, and there was something foreign--alien--hanging in it: a ball of fire. Lines of its terrible radiance shot down, searing my retinas, forming a golden ladder from the Kingdom of Heaven down which one hundred million angels descended, chirping their hellish song. I felt a strange sensation come over me, a sense of a prelude to burning, as though my flesh were anticipating the righteous hellfire in which it soon would burn for all eternity. I cast down my eyes, seeking in vain for the comforting shadow of sin in which I had dwelt for so long, and a voice cried out from behind me and slightly to the left, saying "It Is Done."

Yes, that's right. The snow melted instantly on Tuesday, and suddenly Spring is upon us in all its unholy, cheerful, sunny ruthlessness, like the wrath of a particularly easy-going and friendly god. I have written on the calendar with mine trembling hand: "Abandon All Hope Ye Who Enter Here, For Ye Will Feel Good Whether Ye Likes It Or No."

...and I thought I'd better commemorate this occasion.

What I'm Reading
Barry Buzan, Security: A New Framework for Analysis
Bernard Porter, The Lion's Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850-1983.

This Has Nothing to Do with Cheese Sandwiches

A week later and I am still more or less in the forensic phase regarding the corridor party. I have received madly conflicting eyewitness accounts of that evening, and I suspect I will continue to run into people who were there for quite some time, each of them adding their own stained piece to the warped overall puzzle. As far as I can tell, at one point or another that night, I:

1. Drew an intricate, highly detailed (and wildly inaccurate) map of interstate highways in the US which I advised a Swede to travel on via motorcycle.
2. Explained in great detail how Lord Salisbury’s solution to the 1878 Russo-Turkish war would be extremely useful in America’s current situation in Iraq.
3. Argued with a devoutly Christian Iranian for half an hour about Iran’s nuclear program, with him supporting Bush and me defending Ahmadinejad.
4. Recited Hamlet’s Act IV, Scene 4 soliloquy in reverse. (“Worth nothing be or bloody be thoughts my forth time this from O!”)
5. Spoke Polish.
6. Either hit a guy with a salted herring, or was myself hit with a bucket. Witnesses describe the same person and the same argument, but differ as to who was hit with what.
7. Opened several beers with my teeth.

I suppose I could go into great detail regarding the various anecdotes of what I remember, but really...is this stuff interesting? I mean, I'm more or less hitting the same note over and over, and while I have unshakable faith that reading my grumpy recollections is far more fascinating than anything else anyone could possibly be doing, I don't want this to become one of those "cheese sandwich" blogs--you know, where it's just an account of the excruciating minutia of the author's everyday life. Then again, maybe the corridor parties which have become so dull and predictable and mundane to me are still surreal and exotic to my readership. I dunno. Whatever the case, the party seems to have already established itself as the stuff of legends among the collegiate expat population, and my role in this was not inconsiderable.

My excellent German friend Ben has been up for a week, which of course necessitated a pub crawl in his honor. It was quite an excellent affair, as Ben possesses the same affinity for both Tom Waits and for elaborate inebriated storytelling that I have. Together we kept a motley group of a dozen or so assorted people entertained through six or seven pubs before we finally hit a non-university nightspot (where beers suddenly cost between six and eleven dollars) where we split into two battalions--Ben's lot salsa-ing on the dance floor, my group sitting at the bar, clutching drinks which were far more expensive than refined crude oil. After an hour or so of this, we were driven out into the rain (spring seems to be showing up, so everything is covered in brown sludge and that cold steel rain has started to fall again incessantly) and decided to hit up Max, which is the one and only Swedish fast food chain.
The place looked about like what you'd imagine a place would look like at four in the morning after being ransacked marauding hordes of hungry drunken college students, only with the vaguely European sense that this may have been a recurring phenomenon since at least the time of Karl XII. In some places, I seem to recall the heaps of wrappers, fry boxes, plastic trays, soda cups, and carrion-pecked corpses were nearly thigh-deep.
But let me tell you, coming in drunk from the cold and the rain to a hot meal of fast food at 4 AM is...a very spiritual sort of experience.

At some point during the evening, I came across Sanna, who was completely blasted and looking for her lost purse. Pleading a guilty conscience, she elaborated on last week's end to our brief affair: the chemistry, she felt, was just insufficient, despite a considerable degree of both physical and intellectual attraction. We agreed to meet for coffee this coming week so that she can sit around looking really good (to remind me of what I'm not having) and probably talking about how "confused" she's feeling and no doubt a new guy she's probably started seeing. I went off to pound my head against a wall in an effort to further my understanding of estrogen-based logic.

What I'm Reading
Timothy J. Sinclair, The New Masters of Capital
Graham T. Allison, The Essence of Decision: Explaining the Cuban Missile Crisis
Robert Gilpin, Global Political Economy

We Had Another Corridor Party

It involved food, hilarity, sex, and violence.






I also drank an entire bottle of bourbon.