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.