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.