A narrative blog following the adventures of a group of six people with suspiciously similar characteristics. Updates... well, it used to be three times a week, now it's sporadic.
It was a warm day when this happened. I say that because, frankly, it’s weird enough having a warm day in this country in winter—and, put on top of the events of which you’ll read below, it was a doubly weird day. Doubleweird, if Orwell had written it.
The Drunkard and I sat outside of the café near Woolf College. We watched people as they walked past—generally in groups of languages and nationalities (if you’d want to think of people as representatives of their cultures), but occasionally, you’d see the lone person, hunched over, a universe unto themselves with massive headphones blocking them off from the rest of the people on the pavement. The Drunkard looked the hardest at these people. If there was a sad enough specimen (usually the type to bury themselves in massive coats and glare at the ground as if it had wronged them in some special way), The Drunkard would grunt.
We didn’t talk for a while. I sat there, sipping from my rapidly cooling ceramic cup of Americano, watching the people and, generally, wondering if they, unlike myself, had had enough to eat for lunch. “Fuck,” said The Drunkard. The versatile word wasn’t used in pain, or anger, more like you’d expect someone to go “oy vey” after a catastrophe.
I turned and said, “What’s up?”
The Drunkard grunted and took a sip from his beer.
I checked my watch and noted that it was half past twelve. Now, I understand that England is a country in which drinking at lunch is normal, but I’d never quite gotten into drinking before one. It seemed wrong. Like I was about to hurdle over a cliff. I wondered, right then, what exactly made The Drunkard call me half an hour ago and see if I wanted to go sit in silence outside the café. “You okay?”
It was a minute or so before he answered, and I assumed he hadn’t heard me. “You know Michael Chabon?”
“I’m Jewish-American with a background in literature. Of course I know Michael Chabon.”
“You read his book of essays? Manhood Something or Other.”
“Can’t say I did.”
“There’s a bit in there that goes like—and this is paraphrasing: The art of being a man is to flood everyone around you with a great, radiant arc of bullshit. To give the appearance that you’re keeping your head, when, deep inside, the truest part of you is going ‘Oh shit!’”
We lapsed back into silence for a moment or two. “You don’t really give off the feeling of keeping your head.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
I tossed up my hands. “Hey man, you’re the one who took four flasks of absinthe to Oxford.”
The Drunkard answered with another grunt.
“You okay?”
“I tell you I’ve been going to lunches with a Chabad rabbi?”
“The fuck? Seriously?”
The Drunkard nodded, shivered, took a sip from his beer. “I miss having a community. I’m fuckin lonely man.”
“You’ve got us.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I know. But, really, you guys—and you’re great, all of you except for Stalker and Writer—aren’t what I’m looking for.”
“You’ve got Julie, don’t you?”
The Drunkard snorted. “You shitting me? Man, she passes herself around the flat like a communal spoon. Downside of collectivism, I guess. After I found that out before we went to Oxford, I haven’t spoken to her. Didn’t expect to have any sort of relationship—really—I just…”
“Wanted something exclusive.”
The Drunkard nodded.
A pair of undergrads—both tall, the girl with rosy cheeks and the guy with that infuriating bird-crest hair—walked by hand and hand. The Dunkard slammed his fist on the table and shouted, “Go fuck yourselves!”
The two glanced over and hurried over towards the library.
The Drunkard, pleased, grunted again. “I haven’t had a community in years. Going to fucking Eldritch for school. What the fuck is wrong with me?”
I took a sip from the frigid drink and let him rant. Sometimes that’s what people need: another person around so they’re not talking to themselves.
“You know how many Jews there were in that school?” he asked. “Five. Counting me. The other four were even more secular than I am. You try getting an über-secular Jew to meet up for Passover? Fucking impossible. Forget dates. Forget em. Three times I went out with this one girl, thinking, each time, that maybe I got her wrong. But no, every time we went out it inevitably led to her ranting about how she had Christ in her heart and yadda yadda.
“Going out with a Jewish girl? Forget that. Went out with one one time. Know what she said when I told her my mom wasn’t Jewish? ‘Well, that makes you a goy.’ Makes me a shagitz. Fuck that. I didn’t spend my entire life getting Bar Mitzvahed, confirmed, teaching Hebrew School—I tell you I did that? I did. First grade. I didn’t spend the first part of my life—before college—to get told by some Jewish-American Princess that I’m not a Jew because my Mom wasn’t brought up in shul.
“And so I get here, maybe things are gonna be different. Nope. Fucking French collectivists. You want heartache, you think about smelly fucks shtupping the person you think of as your significant other. That, my friend, is the blues.” He drank from his glass. “Kroenenburg,” he said, after watching me watch. “Sweet lager. Only kind I drink.”
“I’m not a fan of sweet stuff.”
“You need it, sometimes. Women got their ice cream fixation. Me? It’s sweet lager and kosher wine. Kosher wine’s nothing but sugar with grape juice allowed to ferment. You’re doing Fiddler. You know the lyric, ‘God would like us to be joyful/ Even when our hearts lie panting on the floor.’”
“Course I do.”
“Well, it’s like that. I’m not sure about God. Don’t know if I ever will be. But, I figure, there’s wisdom in it all. There’s wisdom anywhere you want to look for it, really. I drink that Palwin stuff and think that, maybe, life has its redeeming qualities. There’s not enough bad stuff in the world to squish out the good. All the shit that happens in Israel. All the racism on both sides, all the bombings, all the warfare, and still. Some kibbutz manages to make a bottle of sweet wine that finds its way all the way to fucking Canterbury, only to be bought and consumed by yours truly.” He held up the glass to the sunlight. “I look through this glass, I take a sip,” he took a sip, “I think the same thing. For all the shit that gets shoveled your way, you gotta remember the sweet things in life. A hug. Your dog. Sitting around, getting drunk and playing Mario Kart. A glass of wine. Your job, which entails tending to grapes in a vineyard. Something. You can’t ever lose sight of what makes it worth the trouble to get out of bed in the morning. You do that, and why even bother doing anything in life?”
He stopped talking for a moment, watched people walk by. I noticed that his eyes were bloodshot and there was a vein popping out of his forehead. His left hand drummed the wooden table while his right clutched the pint glass.
I thought about a lot in that time where he sat, drumming. None of it was really joined up with a preceding thought, but it was all relevant one way or another. “All this because of a woman?” I asked.
Dear, patient reader, I imagine that your tolerance for absurdity is running out. Perhaps it’s gone. Perhaps any microscopic amount of credence I had with you was flung out the window when I told you of my experience in a dilapidated warehouse. Maybe even before: the beginning of our long adventure together, when a bus driver hurled obscenities at us for not running off of a coach. If that is the case, I must insist that everything I have told you has happened. If that annoys you, or makes you feel cheated, then you are about to feel even more annoyed and cheated.
I’m sure that, by now, you have a mental image of a pub’s interior. Carpets, wooden tables, oak bar, brass pulls for ale—that sort of thing. Pub goers seem to be a relaxed lot—except for those who go to rough pubs. For the most part, the places I know are not where one goes out dressed to go clubbing. Now that I have said all of that, I am going to shatter your world-view.
The décor of the Eagle and Child was similar to the description I gave above—though it was less a room, more an extended hallway with some tables and chairs sprinkled around. The sounds and smells of the pub were similar to every other place I’d been: the faint scent of ale and various foods mixing, a soft murmur of conversation from the patrons. The only thing that was different was that the patrons of this pub were dressed in LARP gear.
I should explain. For those of you not acquainted with LARP, it stands for Live-Action Role Play. Take every stereotype of a Dungeons and Dragons player you know and apply it to a real person. Now, imagine that this real person is not content with having their adventures on a pen-and-paper medium; they feel compelled to take it out into the world. So they go out into the woods dressed as wizards and knights and shout things like “Lightning bolt!” and “Polymorph into a stick!” at each other. (A somewhat honorable example of the LARPer would be a Renaissance Fair performer. I say somewhat honorable, because they are getting paid.) These are, in other words, people who try to reenact Lord of the Rings.
The first thing I saw when I walked into the pub was an attractive, youngish blonde woman wearing what I can only describe as a Link from Zelda costume. “Ah,” I thought, “this must be a fancy dress night. Oh, those delightfully cheeky Brits. They cer—dear God, is that man wearing a goblin outfit?” And, indeed, he was. What’s more, he was the bartender. He responded to a cowled wizard’s order in some grumbling tongue the likes of which I’d never heard, and I turned to The Traveler. “What is this?” I asked.
The Traveler stood next to me, his face blank in comprehension, pale in color, and awed in expression. He shook his head. “I do not know.”
The Student cleared his throat. “Where’s The Drunkard?”
I looked around and saw, to my right, that The Drunkard was standing in much the same way as The Traveler. A vein throbbed in his forehead and his left eye twitched. “Hey,” I said. “What’s up?”
“Nerds,” he said.
I snorted. “Says the man who can speak Klingon.”
The Drunkard turned on me with such speed that a fleck of blood from his nose splattered on my shirt. “Er,” I remarked. He grabbed my collar, and I saw his hands shaking in rage. I craned my neck to appeal to The Traveler for help, but he was stunned in confusion.
“There,” said the Drunkard, “is a significant difference between being able to speak a completely made-up language in which there is no cohesion between speakers and dressing up as a God. Damned. Goblin.”
“Hey!” shouted the tall, portly wizard. He shuffled a couple steps towards us, rose his hand in the air in a claw, and shouted, “Chains of Holding!” as he brought it down in a swift swoop.
The Drunkard dropped his hands from my collar and said, “Oh, hell no.” He rolled up his sleeves and advanced.
This got The Traveler’s attention, and he stepped in between the two of them. “Okay, guys. Let’s calm down.” He turned to the wizard, “my friend is a bit, ah, jumpy when it comes to certain things. He’s not going to hurt anyone.”
The wizard snorted. “Well obviously, not now. I cast Chains of Holding on him.”
“Get the fuck out,” said The Drunkard. “You’re shitting me.”
“Silence!” shouted the wizard, bringing his clawed hand down again.
“Okay,” said The Traveler again. He laid a hand on The Drunkard’s shoulder and continued to address the wizard. “What we need to do,” he said, “is just all calm down and have a drink.” He turned to The Drunkard. “How’s that sound?”
The Drunkard grunted.
Apparently, the wizard thought he had a beard, as he mimed stroking a beard to end all beards. “Sir, your diplomacy skill must be quite high.”
I detected a very low growl coming from The Drunkard, as if someone had unleashed a Doberman in the room. No one else seemed to notice.
“Very well,” continued the wizard. “I would be honored to have you join my party at my table in the back of the tavern. We are weary travelers seeking a way into the Underdark to find great hordes of treasure built up by the wicked drow, and would welcome any light-hearted conversation.” He nodded to The Student and myself, and walked to the back of the pub, tankard of ale in hand.
The Traveler turned to The Drunkard. “We’re going to meet his, er, party.”
“I cannot believe we’re doing this.”
The Traveler shrugged. “Hey, you’re the one who chose the pub.” He gave him a smug grin and walked to the bar.
“Oh, that prick,” said The Drunkard.
“Ask me,” I said, “and I’d say he deserves to be. He kicked your ass pretty hardcore.”
The Drunkard grumbled and went up to the bar.
I turned to The Student and saw he was still in frozen where he stood. “Hey,” I said. He didn’t move. “Er.” Still nothing. I poked him and he blinked. “How’s Rebecca?”
“Oh, she’s good,” he said, snapping out of his stupor. “She’s going out to Brighton this weekend and we’re getting together afterwards to trade pictures.”
“Aw,” I said, “that’s so sweet.”
His right eyebrow rocketed up the top of his face. “I can’t be sure if you’re being facetious or not. I’m going to assume that was sincere and go about the day.”
We walked up to the bar, ordered a couple of lagers, and followed The Traveler through the pub. On the walls, there were maps of Middle Earth; the Star Wars galaxy; Arrakis from Dune; and a few other places I hadn’t seen or heard of before. We passed by about ten tables, each filled with people dressed as elves, Klingons, and a couple Jedi necking over a bottle of wine. I was, briefly, reminded of a place in Houston called The Hobbit Hole. I’d never been inside the place, but now, after seeing all this, I’d imagine it must have been similar.
We finally reached the wizard and his party. There were six of them in total—four guys, two women. In such a place as this, a speck of beauty was amplified tenfold, and the elf with the long brown hair and grey eyes was the most gorgeous thing I could imagine. (Writing that, a part of me feels like I am writing a thoroughly obscene bit in a romance novel.) I waved at them all and said, “Guh,” at her in particular. “Damn,” I thought. “Enunciate!”
The Drunkard leaned in and whispered, “You want to be her elf king, don’t you?”
“Yes. We can live in Rivendell for the ages and then, in our old age, go to the Undying Lands.”
“Right,” he said, patting me on my left shoulder.
“Ah,” said the wizard, “and here are our companions. Come,” he gestured to another table, “pull up the table and join us! We shall be merry and—”
“Please,” said The Drunkard. “Please don’t say merry again.”
“Er,” responded the wizard.
I noticed that there was a small free spot on the bench next to the brunette elf, handed my drink to The Student, and with all the grace of a drunken moose, I stumbled over one of their friends—judging by the black leather get-up, he was either into riding motorcycles, S&M, or a rogue—and plopped down. I heard The Drunkard let out a sharp bark of a laugh and ignored him. “So,” I said. “You like elf ears? I’ve never worn elf ears. Don’t think I would. Not that there’s anything wrong with it, it’s just that, you know, I like my own ears and—well, yeah. Hi. I’m The Narrator.”
She said, in the most posh accent I’ve ever heard, “These are my ears; how would I ‘wear’ anything else? My name is Loth’tariel, and I am a Ranger of the nation of—”
At that point I said, “Ah, you’re just as mad as the rest of these people,” stood up, and walked to the table around which my friends sat. Now, I understand that there are some of you who would have stayed on, done some roleplaying—but, frankly, if I have to be an elf to score, then that’s just too much effort.
“What happened to the elf king?” The Drunkard asked.
I grumbled, downed the rest of my beer, and said, “The elf king is no more. Gave my fucking charm or whatever to—I don’t have the patience for being a LARPer.” I turned to the bar, shouted, “Whiskey!” and went to order it.
When I returned, The Drunkard was in a shouting match with a Klingon at one of the nearby tables, our wizard was holding him back, and Loth’tariel the Ranger pointed a toy bow and arrow at the both of them while the rest of her table started placing bets on who would win in the ensuing fight. I sat down next to The Student and said, “What just happened?”
“The Drunkard overheard what I took to be someone hacking up a bunch of phlegm, turned around, and responded to the man in kind. After that, the Klingon stood and—judging by the reaction he garnered—insulted his manhood.”
I nodded and turned to The Traveler. “Why aren’t you trying to stop this?”
He slowly shook his head. “Because, to be honest, I’m still not sure what I’m seeing.” He glanced around the bar.
I did as well. I noticed that the other patrons had fallen dead silent. A group of people wearing Starfleet uniforms had stood and walked our way. They were led by a very skinny man, and the rest of them ranged from one obscenely fat man in a red shirt, a reasonably built man in blue, and a couple tall, well-built women in yellow. (For a second, I was surprised that there were this many women in the place, but then I realized that the world was an ever-changing place, and nerds/geeks were, for the moment, not as abhorred as they once were.) “Ah,” I said, and nudged The Traveler.
He looked to them, moaned, and walked over. “Hello,” he said.
I noticed that the man in front was wearing Vulcan ears, and dearly wished that I had stayed in Canterbury where, at least, if I were seeing this stuff, it would be because I was obscenely drunk. The Vulcan nodded and said, “Greetings. We are here to address this altercation as representatives of the Federation. Please stand aside.”
“Oh dear God, if they could see this in my European Governance class,” The Traveler said—I guess it was supposed to be an interior bit that slipped out. “Look,” he continued, “there’s nothing going on here. Just a few words between a couple grown adults and—”
The two started shouting louder.
“The Klingon,” said the Vulcan, “has just laid a death threat upon your friend’s entire clan. I suggest you stand aside so that we may handle this situation. And then, for the betterment of the entire pub, I suggest that you leave.”
Starfleet Academy pushed past The Traveler and the Vulcan placed his hand on the Klingon’s throat. He collapsed to the ground in a heap and was pulled up by the two other Klingons.
The Drunkard whirled on the Vulcan and shouted, “Just who the fuck do you think you are, Spock?”
“I lent a helping hand.”
“Fuck you, I could have taken him.”
The Vulcan put his hand on The Drunkard’s throat. Instead of crumpling, The Drunkard took the man’s hand, twisted it at the wrist, creating a lovely crack. The Vulcan’s scream hit a high falsetto that should not have been possible.
That’s when all Hell broke loose in the pub. I don’t know who threw the first punch, Nerf arrow, or foam dagger, but soon enough the entire place was engaged in a massive melee. I looked around me, searching for some sort of sanity amongst the madness, and I found none. Humanity had shown its true nature, that day. People dressed as elves, goblins, Jedi, Sith, Klingon, Fremen, and a slew of other fictional groups had at each other, screaming such insults that I could never hope to recreate them here—not because of their obscene nature, but because they were so detailed and specific to the party being insulted, in order to understand the insult, one would have to have a detailed knowledge of the party’s fictional universe.
The group of LARPers we had originally joined pushed past us into the fray, the wizard shouting, “Lightning bolt!” over and over again, throwing yellow ping pong balls. Loth’tariel the hot elf let loose a battle cry that, to me, at least, meant that she was completely insane and that I really should have pretended to be her elf king.
I turned to The Drunkard, who watched it all with a pleased look on his face as he leaned against the now empty table. “There. You see what happens when you break a Vulcan’s wrist?”
On the floor at our feet, the Vulcan in question gave out a whimper. The Drunkard kicked him in the ribs and said, “Not my fault. The Trekkie was trying to do his mind-meld shit on me.”
“Well, gentlemen,” said The Traveler, “I may say, without any hesitation, that you are by far, the most dangerous group of people I’ve traveled with. I don’t know anyone else who could start a pub-wide brawl in England without a mention of football.”
The Drunkard snorted. “Bullshit girls’ game, that is.”
“Anyway,” The Traveler continued. “I think we should head on our way before they realize who started this.”
He tiptoed through the melee, dodging weak punch, after weak kick, after ping-pong balls of all colors, after assorted colors of light sabers, and we followed. “Excuse me,” I said to a Jedi who had just been clocked upside the head with a wooden sword. “Whoops,” to a tall elf struggling against some sort of cow-man thing. A knight found himself mounted by a randy goblin and screamed in an even higher falsetto than the Vulcan. I laughed and dodged his flailing sword. I bolted, ran past the Traveler, and back onto the High Street.
A crowd had gathered. None among them had any LARP gear on, and being back on the High Street with its shopfronts, street performers, and cobblestones reminded me where I was and threw me back into reality. The crowd murmured and I heard a few chuckles. I cleared my throat, steadied myself, and took on what I assumed was an oratorical position—it consisted of puffing out my chest, squaring my shoulders, and placing one foot in front of the other. “Friends, there are a bunch of nerds in there. Join me in laughing at them.”
I spun around and laughed. To my surprise, the rest of the crowd laughed as well. Furthering my surprise, the first person out of the pub’s door was The Drunkard, and he did not take kindly to ten strangers laughing at him. I saw his pupils briefly turn into nuclear explosions, he screamed, “Motherfuckers,” and ran at us. I steadied myself and took the force of his charge. Surprisingly, I didn’t topple over, but neither did he.
I’d never had to restrain an angry man before, and, having done it once, I can safely say that I have no desire to do it again. He flailed, spat, sputtered, reached, clawed, and grabbed at the air behind me, in the general direction of the crowd. He continued to scream obscenities before the crowd finally backed away. I said, “Easy. They’re not laughing at you; they’re laughing at the nerds.”
He slowly stopped his rage-fueled impression of Taz, took about twenty deep breaths, and nodded. “Fucking nerds.”
The Traveler and The Student, who had left the pub as The Drunkard began his rage-spiral, slowly approached us. “So,” said The Student, “where to now?”
The Traveler checked his watch. “We’ve got an hour and a half-ish left. I’d recommend getting sleeping bags for the weekend.”
The Drunkard whirled. “We’re not getting beds?”
“No, we’re not getting beds. We’re staying at a stranger’s apartment. Would you give them beds?”
“If I had them.”
“Then we assume that she does not have the beds. Chrissakes, think for a moment, man. She’s a student. She’s not going to have four extra beds lying around.”
The Drunkard grumbled. “I like beds.”
“Then get an air mattress.”
“Not the same.”
The Student let loose a grin. “Man up.”
The Drunkard turned to The Student and said, “Watch it.”
“No, Drunkard,” The Traveler said, “you watch it. What the Hell’s up with you, man?”
The Drunkard grunted.
A light bulb exploded inside my head. (I realize that that is a strange metaphor, and I blame years of cartoon viewing.) “French troubles?”
The Drunkard grunted again.
The Traveler started moving down the street—I just assumed that he knew where he was going—and the rest of us followed.
“Dude,” I said, “I got ninety-nine problems, but a bitch ain’t one.”
“Word,” said The Traveler. “Bitches ain’t worth shit.”
“Well,” said The Student, “that’s kind of harsh, don’t you think?”
“Sorry. Except for Rebecca. She seems nice,” I said. “Real nice. Definitely not a bitch.”
“Word. She’s kosher,” The Traveler said. He went to a police officer “Excuse me,” said The Traveler.
The officer greeted The Traveler.
“Where can we find an Argos?”
“Follow me, sir.”
We were getting a guided tour to Argos! I looked at The Drunkard and saw him scowling. “What’s up?”
“I have four flasks of absinthe on me.”
I sputtered. “What?!”
“Sh. Look,” he whispered, “act natural. I don’t know if this stuff is illegal over here, but I’m not taking the chance of getting some pig all up in my business. Also: don’t tell The Traveler, but in my bag in the car, I’ve got some mason jars of moonshine.”
This led to a coughing fit on my part. “How the hell did you get moonshine?”
“Made it.”
“Where?”
“Out in the woods behind the college. Look, it doesn’t matter, just act natural.”
It was hard to act natural when one of my companions was acting as a vehicle for some disgusting—not to mention potentially blinding—beverages, but, somehow I must have managed it, because not even The Student—who was usually right on top of discomfort—asked me what was wrong.
Eventually, we made it to Argos. The officer wished us well and left. The Traveler stopped before we entered the store and said, “I don’t want to know what had The Narrator sputtering like that. At least not until we get to the apartment.”
“Okay, Dad,” said The Drunkard.
The Traveler feigned towards The Drunkard, who broke into a sweat, and The Traveler entered the store.
“What do you mean, you don’t know where we are?” asked The Drunkard.
I snapped awake, wiped the drool off my face, and looked around. We were in the middle of the city, surrounded by the sort of buildings that looked at you and said, “Yes, this is Oxford, and you’re probably not smart enough to even visit this place.” The majority of them were big and made of yellowish-brown stone (apparently called Headington and Burford stone—named after quarry sites). It was a beautiful city—one that I hope to visit again—but at that moment, seeing The Drunkard leaning forward into the front seat, the veins in his forehead popping out, and his face turning red took up all my attention. “You don’t have a map?”
“Now,” said The Student, “Drunkard, you should really calm down.”
The Drunkard contorted his body like a snake, turned back to The Student and said, “No, God damn it, this guy is called The Traveler. For fuck’s sake, you’d think that he’d remember where to go. Hell, I can tell you where every bar is in a ten-mile radius, and I haven’t even gotten out of the car yet.”
The Traveler, suddenly playing the annoyed father to The Drunkard’s upset mother on a car trip (which, I guess, made myself and The Student the children), tapped the steering wheel and said, “She said her place was by the campus.”
“There is no campus, you schmuck,” said The Drunkard. “Oxford, Cambridge, UCL, these places don’t have campuses. They’re sprawled around the city. A child would know that.”
I glanced in the rear-view mirror on my side of the car and saw The Student cringing and trying very, very hard to sink into the back of his seat.
For my part, I’d learned long ago not to get involved when such an altercation was brewing. Once, when a few friends and I were driving to Panama City Beach, the fight escalated to the point where one man pulled a knife. It was used to peel an apple, but, initially, we were all frightened.
The Traveler took a deep breath and pulled the car into a spot near what turned out to be the High Street. His voice hit a low register, and he said, “Out.” He opened his door and stepped onto the sidewalk, where he cracked his knuckles, back, legs, and neck. Then he hopped up and down and stretched.
“Oh,” said The Drunkard. “You wanna go, motherfucker?” As The Traveler was in the process of his bone-cracking, I imagine The Drunkard was doing this to psych himself up. “We can go. I haven’t been in a fight in a long time. Break your fuckin neck,” he said. The Drunkard opened up his door, stepped into the road—nearly getting run over by a car in the process—and stepped opposite The Traveler on the sidewalk.
The Traveler and The Drunkard stared at each other for a few moments. “Five quid on The Traveler,” I said.
“You’re kidding,” The Student said.
I shook my head. “Nope. The guy’s so together, he must be a complete nutcase. No one is that calm without harboring some sort of mental deficiency. In fact, I bet he rips out The Drunkard’s heart.”
The Student turned to me and raised an eyebrow. “You okay? You know, in the head.”
“Yeah.” I thought about it. “Maybe. Might watch a few too many kung fu movies.”
The Traveler bowed and then, in a movement so fluid it was almost slow motion, did a complete flip into a handstand, parted his legs in the air and rotated three hundred and sixty degrees. The Drunkard backed away. The Traveler flipped up again, this time landing closer to The Drunkard. He shifted from one foot to the other, moving in time to some unheard rhythm, and sailed out a kick that connected with The Drunkard’s left rib. The Drunkard sailed into the city wall next to him and The Student laughed. “Holy crap, he knows capoeira.”
“What? It looks like he’s dancing.”
“Yeah. It’s a Brazilian thing. I’ve never seen anyone actually use it in a fight. This is nuts.”
Apparently The Drunkard thought so as well, because shielded his head with his arms and scooted up against the wall.
Undeterred, The Traveler advanced in the almost bird-like fashion, flipped onto his hands again, and spun, his right foot landing on the back of The Drunkard’s head. The Drunkard flopped to the ground, a rag doll. The Traveler hopped back on to his feet and helped the Drunkard up, moved him against the car, and put his hands on his shoulders. The Student and I rushed out of the rented car. I shouted, “Don’t rip out his throat! I was just kidding! No one has to die!”
The Traveler turned to me and said, “What?”
“Er, nothing.”
He shrugged and returned to The Drunkard. “Count to ten.”
The Drunkard groaned. I got a look at his face. Blood cascaded down from his nose.
“Jesus,” I said. “Is he okay?”
“Yeah, just stunned,” said The Traveler. “I could have done worse, but there was no reason.” To The Drunkard: “Hey, listen. Count to ten.” He snapped his fingers in the man’s face, and The Drunkard made eye contact. He then counted to ten.
“Good,” said The Traveler. “Now, I know it’s infuriating that we don’t know where we are, but Lena is in class until five. So we’re kind of on our own until then, yeah?”
“Yeah,” muttered The Drunkard. “You got a napkin or something?”
The Student dashed into the car and pulled out a packet of Kleenex. He handed it to The Drunkard, who then stuffed a bunch into his nostrils.
“Good,” said The Traveler. “Don’t swallow too much blood. Now here’s what I’m thinking.” He checked his watch—it also occurred to me then that he was the only one of us who owned a watch. “It is three o’clock now. We take a nice little wander around Oxford’s center until fiveish, at which point, I give her a call and we can figure out where to go. How’s that sound?”
The Student and I agreed. The Drunkard nodded and said, “Sure. Just don’t go Apeshit Bird Man again.”
The Traveler patted The Drunkard on his shoulders again and said, “Excellent. Now, judging from the pedestrians right there,” he gestured to my left, where there were a lot of people walking down the street, “I’m guessing that way is the High Street. Shall we?”
We then walked down the street. The Student and I walking alongside The Traveler, asking where he learned capoeira (turns out he took classes in undergrad), and The Drunkard trailing behind, clutching the Kleenex and snorting every once in a while.
The High Street, like everything else in Oxford, was much larger and filled with more of the trappings of a city than Canterbury. Until now, my experiences of England were limited to Canterbury and London, and now I realized just how much of a country town Canterbury was. That, of course, didn’t mean that I liked it any less. It was just that now I realized that there was an alternative.
It’s a tricky business, thinking of a British city and attempting to come up with an American counterpart. Suffice it to say that Oxford has the shopping that Canterbury lacks; has different neighborhoods that are quite distinct from one another—some of which reminded me of Nashboro Village back home; has even more history; and, most important for me, has several multi-story bookstores. (The sort of bookstores in which you can spend five hours without getting through the fiction section.)
Walking down the High Street, we were surrounded by buildings that I describe as Gothic architecture—but that might, in fact, be completely wrong. Clearly, I was in a new league of city. “Posh” would be the word. “Man, you can just smell the wealth, can’t you?” asked The Drunkard.
The Student shook his head. “No, this is beyond class distinctions. This is a city of history, of learning, of culture. My friends, this is where I should have gone for a Master’s.”
We passed a group of chavs. They wore the track suits, gold chains, and gelled hair typical of their species, and, like the rest of their ilk, spoke entirely too loudly. “No, Reg,” one of them—wearing a red track suit and holding a lead on a bulldog, “you’re wrong. The cost-benefit analysis of selling ganja to selling cocaine brings the equation leaning heavily towards marijuana.”
Reg, wearing a green track suit and pulling along a lady chav—frantically texting on her slender mobile phone, her hair pulled back so tight I thought I could see her scalp cracking—said, “What are you on about? With my connections, the profit I can make on cocaine far surpasses marijuana.”
By this time, our two groups had passed each other, but I caught a little more. “Ah, but consider the repercussions of getting caught with cocaine compared with those of getting caught with marijuana…” And then they trailed off, having entered a McDonald’s.
“You see?” asked The Student. “Even the idiots are smart!”
The Drunkard shrugged. “Yeah, sure, cool. Hey, a pub.” He shot off and walked into a place called The Eagle and Child. The colors featured, you guessed it, an eagle carrying a diaper-clad baby through the sky. What this meant for families with children, I had no idea. “Think we should follow him?” I asked.
The Traveler grunted. “If we don’t then we may lose him for good.” He checked his watch. “Fuck it, we’ve got a few hours.”
I imagine that, on the day we left—a Friday—those of us who went on the trip went a bit mad. The Drunkard—who, despite always carrying a whiskey flask and being slightly wobbly half of the day, was normally the most sensible out of us—didn’t say that renting a car would be a bad idea. Why should it be? We were going to be going for a pleasant drive to just north of London and we had each prepared a CD or two for the trip.
I am not one to make a claim out of habit. I believe that every time I form an opinion, it is built upon experience and fact. I can now say that you should never rent a car unless unless you are in a country with a very clearly marked highway system, or you are driving with a native of that country. I am sure that there will be some Brits reading this who will knock their tea and crumpets over in shock at that statement. “What?” they will ask. “It is the clearest thing in the world! Why, to get to London, one simple must go up the A-1, meet the A-123, then get back on the A-1 at Cheltsbuckworth, follow the roundabout until the poppy field, then get on the M-1, at which point there will be another roundabout and you’ll take the third exit to get on the M-2. Simple!”
For the English, it may very well be. However, I say to the Englishman: Drive in the United States. We have straight lines that you follow for the length of England before you have to make a connection with another straight line at a slightly different angle going across the country. The inherent difference between the Briton and the American is that, in the U.S., roundabouts are something out of a Monty Python sketch.
Do I blame The Traveler for our journey of four hours—when it should only have taken two and a half? No. I blame society.
We left Canterbury at eleven o’clock and started on the labyrinth of roads and highways around eleven thirty. Everything started well, aside from The Drunkard’s musical fare of hardcore punk. (This wasn’t a big deal, though, as the 60-track CD only lasted twenty-five minutes.) It was around the time that we found ourselves in Dover that I realized that something was wrong.
I drummed the Ford’s dashboard and glared out at the sunlight reflecting off of the ferries at the port. “Traveler,” I said.
“Mmm?” he asked. He, like everyone else, was staring in disbelief at the ferries. He dug a map out of the sideboard.
“We seem to be in Dover. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t London in England, and not France?”
I heard the unmistakable snap-hiss of a can being opened from the back seat, turned around, and started saying, “You are putting that Guinness away right now,” and stopped at “putting.”
“What?” asked The Drunkard. He took a sip from a Coke can. “If you’re going to blame me, forget it. You’re shotgun, you’re the navigator.”
I grumbled. The CD started playing again. The first track—from a L.A. band called Rancid Sinkhole, the track was called “Fuckfuckfuck”—screeched into existence, bounced around the car for ten seconds, and stopped. Seagulls flew around outside. “Why a red Ford Fiesta?” I wondered. “We should have gotten a Toyota. Toyotas have good gas mileage. Petrol mileage. Do they just say ‘mileage’ over here? ‘Petrol’ is too many syllables.”
“Right,” said The Traveler, balling up the map and chucking it at The Student, who had fallen asleep right as the engine started. The map bounced off his forehead, his eyes fluttered, and he began snoring again. “I know what we did wrong,” said The Traveler.
“Went to Dover?” asked The Drunkard.
“Yep. Keep your eyes on the lookout for signs reading ‘North’ this time. Can’t be hard.”
He started the car again, the second song (“Rage, Death, and Pancakes,” a thirty-second magnum opus by the same band) soared out of the speakers, and we pulled out from the port’s car park.
Around the time when we hit a medium-sized town after leaving Canterbury for the second time, we came across the utter, utter Hell of trying to decipher a roundabout exit sign for the first time. Imagine, if you will, an interstate sign that shows the upcoming exits. A roundabout sign is about the same size, except white and with a diagram of the roundabout in the center. The diagram shows exits in the form of lines jutting out of the center circle. The trick of figuring one of these things out lies in understanding which line you’re coming from and which line you’re going to. The first time you come upon one of these, driving in a circle at twenty-five miles an hour, it is a very confusing concept. We circled the roundabout five times before we finally figured out which way we needed to go.
“Guys,” said The Drunkard, “for the love of God, you need to figure this out.”
This was on the third orbit. “If,” said The Traveler, “you have any hints as to how we can do this, then please let us know. Otherwise, shut up.”
“That’s the one!” I shouted, leaning forward and jabbing my finger at an arrow-shaped sign that read ‘London.’
We drove past it that time, but, by God, on the next orbital, we made it. The three of us who were conscious cheered and briefly woke up The Student, who shouted, “Gah. What? Pen—” and fell back to sleep.
After this, we hit the M-25. The M-25 is a giant, roughly circle-shaped ring that runs around London. It’s eight lanes of traffic, with signs every hundred yards warning drivers that they are being recorded by CCTV cameras—for their safety. During the day, it looks like every interstate in the United States. During the night, the CCTV warnings illuminate the drive with red neon lights. The day we drove into it from the South, the M-25 was in its usual state of immobile traffic. The British, it seemed, loved queuing so much that they decided to queue on their motorways for no reason.
We pulled onto the M-25, drove ten feet, and stopped. “Fuck,” said The Traveler.
I grunted and put my feet up onto the dashboard. “Wouldn’t be a road trip without a traffic jam.” And then, the gray skies opened up and torrential rain attacked the M-25. “And it wouldn’t be England without rain.”
The Traveler took The Drunkard’s CD out of the drive (The Drunkard didn’t complain, as after we left the roundabout, he, too, fell asleep) and replaced it with his roots rock album, put it on shuffle, and the opening licks of Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “I Put A Spell On You” came on. “I spy,” I said, “with my little eye—”
“No,” said The Traveler.
“Aw.”
“There are some things that should not be spoken over. Creedence is one of those things.” He reached over, turned up the volume, and let the music wash over him. I watched the wipers move back and forth over the windshield.
Traffic moved a few feet. I noticed the distinct lack of honking in the traffic jam. I shuddered. Lately, I’d been feeling homesick. Hearing Creedence come from car speakers did it, but the absence of any sign of driving aggression did it even more. “This isn’t the way people behave,” I thought. “Drivers should be leaning out of their windows and screaming obscenities. They should at least be honking. What kind of civilized country doesn’t have road rage?” The song ended and I leapt at the silence. “So where are we staying?”
“Rickard—the guy from Munich—has a friend going to Oxford. She’s letting us crash at her and her roommates’ apartment. Shh, I think I kno—yeah, it’s Reverend Peyton’s Big Damn Band.” He turned up the music. This one sounded like some meth-fueled shine-stillers had picked up some instruments and formed a band. Still. Pretty good.
The traffic crawled along the M25 and we passed by places that looked a lot more interesting than sitting in a car. As we passed Super Fun Land—a place that looked like a castle, but was crawling with children, I thought back to my childhood and remembered a place not unlike that in Tennessee. Of course, the difference was that this was England, and there was torrential rainfall, and still the children continued to play. You had to give it to the English: they were resilient. “Traveler,” I said. “Why don’t the English just leave this country en masse, get away from the rain, and go to, say, Marseille.”
“Ah,” responded my companion. “Well, in order to find the proper answer to that question, we must turn briefly to genetics. There is a rare gene. So rare, in fact, that it really only appears in people whose roots in this country go back two hundred years. This gene, which forms as a result of generations of people drinking hard water and legitimately enjoying black pudding, is responsible for hating the French. And, if the English were to leave England, they’d find that the closest land is France. And that, to them, is unbearable.”
“Fascinating,” I said.
The traffic moved on, my head nodded forward, and when I woke up we were in Oxford City Center.
I’ve been keeping things from you, Dear Reader. Many things. Some interesting, some not so interesting, some juicy, some, in fact, quite dry—for example, I’ve been conducting experiments as to figuring out how much Yiddish one can introduce into a conversation with a Brit without them losing all understanding of a conversation. Quite dry in my opinion, but there you have it.
One of these hidden cards—somewhere between interesting and Why-Are-You-Telling-Me-This,-It-Is-Dull—is that I fell in with a couple of Brits and started a drinking/screaming club around two weeks after I arrived in Canterbury. The screaming aspect of the club comes from one of them being a fan of both Bon Jovi and the Confederacy—two institutions for which I hold no love. So, inevitably, I’d go out with Dixie (as I called the man) and Chuckles (who had a tendency to launch into spiels that seemed ripped from the pages of either H.P. Lovecraft or Ayn Rand, depending on how he felt that day) and we’d get to talking. Generally, we’d start talking about music and Dixie would bring up Jon Bon Fucking Jovi, and it would all devolve into mayhem.
Now, you see, Dixie was a good guy. Really, he was—except for Jon Bon Jovi and the Confederacy. I’m sure that you, dear reader, have friends who consistently surprise you with their ideas. I have several. I, in fact, have a history of these sorts of friendships. Once, a long time ago, I was friends with a neo-Nazi. In my defense: I never claimed to be a smart man.
At any rate, Dixie was in the Musical Theatre Society. I am, at best, lukewarm towards musicals. Yes, one might say, “How does every one know the dance that starts up out of no where?” and follow it with a hearty “Hurr hurr.” I try to convince myself that my reasons are more intellectual. I find that, most of the time, the song and dance routines break up a perfectly good narrative. However, Dixie was a friend, and I decided to support him in his endeavor—at the time, I viewed it as if I were helping a friend go through withdrawals. (Besides, it was in the building right next to my flat, so I didn’t have an excuse not to go.)
The Society put on a showcase consisting of songs from The Blues Brothers, Avenue Q, The Producers and a bunch of others which I’d never heard of before. By and large, it was very well done, especially considering how they were performing on a lecture stage in an academic building. Now, the reason I bring all of this up, aside from my goal of giving a proper account of my time abroad, is that afterwards, Dixie mentioned that the Society was putting on Fiddler on the Roof and would begin casting in a few weeks.
My brain went into hyperdrive. This was no ordinary musical—this was Fiddler on the Roof. The musical every Jew is forced to watch at birth.[1] And I would be Tevye! I stared at Dixie, still wearing his Hitler outfit (they’d finished the show with “Springtime for Hitler,” complete with a terrifying Aryan-looking man in a flawless SS uniform) grabbed him by the shoulders, and said, “What?”
“Casting’s in a few weeks. Starts on Thanksgiving, actually.”
He then started talking about the American Society, which was going to have a Thanksgiving dinner. I may have told him that myself and the other five were coming, but I’m not sure. I was too excited.
In fact, I ran out of the building, to my flat, knocked over Zaf along the way, and blared the soundtrack sixteen times. It should be noted that this is the extent to which I Jew out. Yes, I could go to synagogue on Shabbat. Yes, I could keep kosher. Yes, I could volunteer and fulfill some mitzvot, but, honestly, that’s a lot of work and I like bacon.
[1] And thou shalt view Fiddler on the Roof, and seek to be like Topol. –The Book of Culture, 3:12
After the meal, we walked out of the college into the bitter, cold night and made our way down Tyler Hill to see what this Bonfire Night was all about. I learned that most of the British holidays involved a low-grade pyromania—whether it involved attempting to blow each other up with low-yield explosives and inevitably failing (Christmas), making a fruitcake and setting it on fire (also Christmas), or building a gigantic fire and then setting off fireworks (Bonfire Night). I attribute this to some sort of primordial urge to be entertained in the desolation that is Britain in the winter.
The historical basis for Bonfire Night runs as follows: A while back, a few guys from the minority Christianity got fed up with being oppressed by the majority Christianity. Being English and thus obsessed with fire, they decided to blow up Parliament. Doing so, they hoped, would kill every Parliament member of the opposing sect of Christianity (as well as the King), and thus open the way for their sect to take the reins until the other sect got their shit together and did the same right back at them. Their plot was discovered, and, being the barbarians the English are, the King ordered the leader of the plot—Guy Fawkes—to be tortured and killed six ways to Sunday.
In the modern era, they mimic this brutal slaying by building a wooden effigy and tossing it in the middle of a gigantic bonfire. And then, being English, they stand around in relative silence and murmur, “My, lovely fire this year. The Council have done a smashing job of it. Let’s go queue for a potato” and so on and so forth. After the fire dies, there is a fireworks display. In some towns, where the locals are more adventurous, the custom is to chuck flaming kegs down a hill; because, hey, why not?
It was quite a schlep from campus to the bonfire field. Such a distance that we found it took us over an hour. Though, that isn’t indicative of the distance so much as it is indicative of The Writer refusing to move faster than a light saunter while complaining through the entire journey. (It is a proven, scientific fact that the rate at which one complains is identical to the rate at which a group is slowed in their travel. Thus, The Writer’s constant complaining made us walk roughly half as fast as we would have otherwise.) However, we finally made it to the Bonfire festivities after weaving through neighborhoods and side streets.
The makeup of the field was as follows: At the far side, about one hundred yards away from the entrance, there was the damndest thing I’ve ever seen. It was one of those train rides for children—you know the sort, they’re built in every state fair across the States—except it was called The Rio Grande Railway and was laden with American flags. To the left of the train, and a few yards closer to the entrance was a carousel. Across from that, to the right of the train and about seventy yards away from the entrance, were a line of food and game booths that stretched to the entrance. The main fare of these booths were potatoes and various sausages. Near the carousel, there was a place selling cotton candy.
On the other side of the field, nearer the bonfire but opposite the entrance, were a few lawn-type games. From what I could tell, it looked like there were horseshoes being thrown. I didn’t hear any screams of pain and anguish, so I assume that lawn darts were not part of the festivities. And then, as I believe I’ve covered everything but the mass of people, there was the bonfire.
The bonfire was massive. Before this, the largest one I’ve seen was about five feet tall; and the largest one I’ve built was half a foot tall. (I never had an aptitude for building things. Lego blocks eluded me in their complexity.) This flaming behemoth stood about twenty feet in the air and forty feet in diameter. By the time we arrived, it hadn’t yet been lit, but there was a palpable sense of impatience—British impatience, that is: the sense that, if something didn’t get started soon, someone might start grumbling under their breath. Carnival music, sailed through the air, making me feel perilously close to madness. I looked to my right and saw The Stalker twitching. “Hey,” I said. “It’s cool, man. It’s just music.”
“No,” The Stalker said. “That’s not it.”
“Then wh—”
He pushed me aside and into The Drunkard, who knocked over The Student.
“Cotton candy!” The Stalker yelled, throwing his arms into the air like an Olympian who just broke a world record. “Cotton candy!” He bolted into the crowd and made a beeline for the cotton candy booth, knocking over elderly folk and children in the process.
“What in blue hell was that?” asked The Drunkard.
The Student groaned from the ground and said, “Would ‘the strangest thing I’ve ever seen’ suffice?”
The Traveler helped him up. “Maybe. I’d be more tempted to call it batshit insane and leave it at that—for this is England, and you may very well see stranger things before the night is out.”
Mericfully, the carnival music cut out and was replaced by a relatively melodic, high-pitched squeal from the speakers around the grounds. “Let the fire,” someone announced, “be lit.”
Four men holding torches[1] walked to the bonfire and touched their flames to the base of the construct. The fire caught and roared upwards. It was at this time that I noticed the effigy of Guy Fawkes. As the flames licked up, they caught engulfed the avatar and the fire increased threefold. My guess is that there were two things that could have caused this: The first, and this is my preferred explanation, is that the centuries of English hatred of this man made the effigy especially vulnerable to fire. The more plausible, and therefore more boring, explanation is the thing was doused in gasoline beforehand.
Regardless, the bonfire was now engulfed and, even from this distance, I felt about fifteen degrees warmer. Remember that the remaining five of us were about fifty yards from the bonfire. This meant, in my mind, that everyone within a fifteen yard radius (and the closest you were allowed to be to the fire was ten yards) had been incinerated in the blast. This, of course, was not true, but it was the first experience I had of seeing the British in their natural character: Extreme discomfort in the name of tradition. I’m not entirely sure if this is admirable or if it is an indication that they possess some protein deficiency resulting in a masochistic complex. Now better because of the warmth, I clapped my hands and said, “Okay, who’s up for some cotton candy?”
“Nope,” said The Drunkard, taking out the largest hip flask I’d ever seen and having a massive swig from it. “I’m going to get a potato.” He walked off towards the potato stands.
“I find the idea of cotton candy repugnant,” said The Writer. “Really, humanity? Sugar around a stick? That’s the best you can do? Really?” He snorted. “Go rot your teeth. You might fit in better with these barbarians.” Then he walked off. I watched him closely. Sure enough, after feinting that he was going towards the sausage stands, he went to a cotton candy booth.
“What a schmuck,” I said.
“Fuck it,” said The Traveler. “I haven’t had cotton candy since I was a kid. Wanna go, Student?”
“Nah, there’s some vin chaud over there, so I think—yeah, wine time.”
“Hey,” The Traveler said, “be careful. We can’t carry you up that hill.”
“I only brought ten quid. Chances are I won’t get smashed off of that.”
The Traveler and I walked towards the cotton candy booth to which The Stalker had bolted. That’s when I saw the train laden with American flags. “Well,” I said, “that may just barely beat The Stalker’s weirdness.”
The Traveler looked at the train and sighed. “You’ll find,” he said, “that the rest of the world knows of only three Americas. The first is New York City. Everyone there, they think, behaves like the cast of Friends.”
I wretched.
“I know,” he said, “disgusting, isn’t it? But, what are you gonna do? They don’t like Seinfeld over here. The second America—Los Angeles—is where all of the scumbags come from. That is where materialism, mindless entertainment, and Starbucks originate.”
“And the third America?”
“The third America is the Old West. Everyone not living in New York City or L.A. either does not exist or rides around on horses shooting at each other with six-guns and shouting ‘yahoo.’ That, my friend, is why you are currently staring in shock at a carnival ride called The Rio Grande Train Company.” He paused for a moment. “Honestly, I’m just surprised they got the amount of stars on the flag right. Sometimes they just have a blue square with U.S.A. in the middle.”
I started humming our national anthem and successfully ignored the ill-natured look the Traveler was shooting at me. We queued for the cotton candy and saw, at the front of the line, The Stalker.
He was bouncing. Literally. There was no figurative play of words here, the man was bouncing. His mouth moved up and down rapidly, and I’d be willing to bet that the man was saying “cotton candy” over and over again. I nudged The Traveler and pointed. His jaw dropped. The line moved forward, and The Stalker walked to the counter, and shouted “Gimme cotton candy!”
“Candy floss?” I heard the man behind the counter say.
“Sure, just give me that sugary goodness.” By now, The Stalker was yelling quite loudly—loudly enough to beat out the music from the carousel, the Hellish cacophony streaming forth from speakers around the grounds, and the shouts and screams of children. “I’ve been a good boy, just give me the candy.”
The Traveler and I turned to each other and said, “How about a potato?” at the same time.
We quit the line, stealing one last glance at The Stalker, who had by now buried his face in a giant pink lump, and fled to the potato stands. Along the way, we ran across The Student, who was leaning up against a tree and sipping from a cup. I went up to him and, without speaking, took the cup from him and drank. “Er,” he said, “what’s the idea?”
“I need this more than you do,” I said. I pulled a couple pounds out of my pocket and gave them to him. “Go buy yourself another cup. After seeing what I’ve seen—well, it’s nightmare fuel.”
The Student turned to The Traveler and said, “What, did you guys see someone get disemboweled?”
The Traveler, pale-faced, said, “No. The Narrator exaggerates a little bit, but it was, nevertheless, quite frightening. Go, my friend. Go and fetch a cup of wine for your health, and we will tell you.”
The Student shook his head, pocketed my coins, and walked off.
The wine took the edge off of my madness. I was still a shaken man, and in the recesses of my mind, I could still see The Stalker, as if in the midst of some cannibalistic ritual, revert to some primordial, barbaric state and bury his face in a sticky lump of pink goo. No doubt that you do not find this as odd as I do. You, like The Student, probably think me quite mad for behaving the way I do after seeing this, but I can only respond with that motto of the man who suffers: You weren’t there.
The Traveler, it seemed didn’t have the same sensitivities that I did, as, by now, when I had finished the cup of mulled wine, he had regained his complexion and, though he was glancing over his shoulder, he seemed normal. “I wonder if that Dutch girl’s here.”
“My good man!” I shouted. “How can you think of women at a time like this?”
The Traveler sighed. “I have a penis, and I have the urge to copulate. I know that, somewhere deep inside you, you have such urges, and once you stop going mad from seeing The Stalker and the cotton candy incident… you’ll…” he turned pale again. “Oh. Oh, God. The horror.”
“Yes. View it in your mind’s eye and know my pain.”
At this time, The Student returned to us with a couple more cups of wine and said, “Okay, so what did you see that’s got you all weird?”
“The Stalker was eating cotton candy.”
He blinked at me. “That’s it?”
“It was in an eldritch fashion! As if C’thulhu, rising from R’lyeh and yearning for the dreams of man, were feasting instead of a being with whom we are familiar.”
“Okay, Lovecraft, you know something?”
I shook my head.
“Normally, I’m not one to say, ‘go get laid and your problems will be solved,’ but you really, really, need some release. Listen to yourself,” he took a sip from the wine, smacked his lips, “this is good wine, by the way—listen to yourself go on about The Stalker eating cotton candy. Worst case, he just stuck his face in there and started eating.”
“And that is exactly what he did!”
“Then who gives a damn? He eats like a kid. Jesus, pull yourself together. Look at The Traveler: He’s kosher.”
I looked at The Traveler, and he was back to normal. I took a deep breath. Was it truly so weird that The Stalker was devouring cotton candy in such a way? Yes. Was I going to let it ruin my night? Hopefully not. I took another deep breath and nodded my head. “You’re right. I’m bored and letting it get to me. Imagination’s a powerful thing, and mine’s running amok right now.”
“Good,” said The Student. “Now, when do the fireworks start? The bonfire’s not keeping me as warm as it wa, and I’m about to start shivering. I hate shivering.”
“Think,” said The Traveler, “of all the long-winded prose you’ve had to read over your career in academia. All of the two-dimensional characters excused because they’re in Works of Literary Art. All of those damn Russian authors who can’t tell a plot from a hole in the ground. Think of all that, and your hatred will make you warm.”
“There you guys are,” shouted The Drunkard. He held a hefty baked potato in one hand and a plastic fork in the other. “You gotta get a potato. One pound per—damn good deal, I think. Hey,” he said, poking The Student in the shoulder with his fork, “why are you twitching?”
“Doestoevsky. Doestoevsky, Chekhov.” The Student raised his hands in the air, still clutching the mulled wine, and shouted, “Tolstoy!”
The Drunkard, slowly, deliberately, stared at both myself and The Traveler and said, “You need to leave this man alone, or he will, mark my words, burn down a bookstore.”
“Narrator!” shouted a voice from my right. I turned and saw Zaf walking with a couple of his other friends. At this time, he was going out (ish) with a girl from Thailand, and she flanked him on his right. On his left was one of his friends, a Greek woman whose actual name I had no chance in Hell of pronouncing, but I and everyone else just called Natalya.
I gulped and muttered, “Guh,” along with a weak wave. About ninety percent of the time, when I was around a woman I found attractive, I lost all vocal faculties and resulted to uttering monosyllabic words. Occasionally I managed an atrocious joke, but that was about it.
“What are you going up to?” asked Zaf.
“The Hell did you just say?” asked The Drunkard.
“Er, Drunkard,” I said, “Student, Traveler, this is Zaf, er, his girlfriend, and Natalya.”
“No, no no,” said The Drunkard, “you’re not getting off that easy. The hell did you just say?”
Zaf responded with a huge grin and said, “Hey, dude, it’s all okay.”
The Drunkard grunted, took out his flask and took a swig. “I’ll give you English lessons. Five pounds an hour. Best deal you’ll find here. I’m not a shyster like the damn Brits—you can’t trust the Brits with money, I say; they just go around spending it on bullshit like those bizarre haircuts they have.” A tall British guy walked by with his hair gelled and crested at the top in a bizarre mockery of a faux-hawk. “See?” asked The Drunkard. “You can’t trust a guy like that. You can’t trust a people that allow that sort of haircut to exist without mockery. Who can you trust? Me. I’m a journalist—the most honest profession in the world.”
Zaf laughed and gave me the perplexed look I had come to recognize as “I don’t understand a word of what was just said.” Natalya, who acted from time to time as an interpreter of the English-speaking world, translated. After she was finished, Zaf said, “Ah. Well, no thanks. The Narrator can help.”
The Drunkard looked at me and said, “You’d better fucking help. The guy sounds like he stepped out of the 80s.”
I shrugged. “I’m working on it. Languages are hard.”
The Drunkard spat out what sounded like a factory floor.
“Er,” I responded.
“That means ‘kiss my ass’ in Klingon.”
I burst into laughter. “You know Klingon? You fucking nerd.”
I then found myself upside down and in a temporary rubbish bin. After pushing myself out, I dusted myself off and said, “Hey, I play WarCraft. I was just saying tha—”
“Watch it,” said The Drunkard.
I held my hands up and nodded.
An explosion sounded above us and a burst of green light temporarily illuminated the grounds. We looked up and caught the fading outline of the first burst from the fireworks display. All told, it was a decent enough show. Coming from Knoxville, I wasn’t that impressed. (For those that don’t know, Knoxville created a holiday for the sole purpose of shooting off fireworks. And, because it is such a center of creativity and originality, it is called Boomsday.) Everyone else in the group, though, was. Eventually, The Writer (the traces of cotton candy still sticking to his face) and The Stalker (utterly clean faced and slurping mulled wine) joined us and we all watched the spectacle as one.
I looked around and saw that, overall, the rest of the people gathered in the field were having the same experience.
The fireworks exploded overhead, and, right after they finished, it started raining. “Well, well,” I said to no one in particular, “looks like the weather’s going to put out the fire.”
The Drunkard turned and gave me an exhausted look. “I’m sorry?”
“Er, you know. Cause the fire might spread and…” I looked at the rest of the group and cleared my throat. “Look, I never said I was a smart man.”
The Drunkard patted me on my shoulder and said, “I’m heading back to campus, anyone want to come along?”
“Yeah, I’ve got some more reading to do,” I said.
The Student and The Writer said they’d go back as well—we three, it seemed, turned in much earlier than the rest of the group—and so, under the steadily increasing rainfall, we left for campus.
[1] Note: The word ‘torch’ in England means ‘flashlight.’ This is absurd to the level of Kafka, and I shall be damned if it creeps into my vocabulary.
The above is about half t of an essay I turned in for Ranting in Literature. One day, I was walking through the School of English building, trying to find a professor’s office, and I saw the essay printed out and displayed on a corkboard with comments like: “This kid is nuts!” and “Ha ha!” scrawled all over it. I do not expect to get a good mark in the class.
The next day, around five, our group met at one of the bars on campus for a meal before going to Bonfire Night. By this time, each of us was feeling a bit homesick and we decided to go to the bar that featured Tex-Mex cuisine—a tribute to the cheap Mexican restaurants sprinkled around the entire United States.
On the way, I asked The Student what he was doing the other day that had him disappear from the pub in such a rush. He shrugged and said, “Oh, you know, nothing important. I just had to, ah, take care of something.”
“Liar,” I said. “Your pants are aflame.”
“Fine. I had a date.”
I punched The Drunkard in his back, to which he responded by putting me in a headlock and said, “Do not do that again.”
Quickly turning purple—it appeared that The Drunkard had a terrifying natural strength—I choked out, “Okay.”
He released me and said, “Okay, what’s up?”
I wheezed, tried to respond, and coughed. I pointed to The Student and doubled over for a second. “Date,” I managed.
“You got a date?” asked The Traveler.
“Yeah,” said The Student, blushing a little.
“Hey, good for you, man. Didn’t we tell you the Law of Averages would work in your favor?”
“That’s not the best way to express congratulations,” said The Student, “but I’ll take it.”
“Next time,” said The Stalker, “don’t order red wine with a pasta dish.” He didn’t look back while talking. “It makes you look pedestrian.”
“You were following us?”
“No,” said The Stalker. “I was… in a good position.”
The Student and I looked at each other. It was one of those moments that bespoke a vast well of sympathy between comrades.
Without much more conversation, we stepped into the bar. (To be fair, it was an incredibly short distance from Dickens to the bar, and we’d already hit the entrance to the place by the time The Stalker, yet again, weirded all of us out.)
We hadn’t been in the place before, and so we expected a dimly-lit place with soft mariachi music playing in the background, a TV showing Mexican dramas over the bar, and a few murals of men in fields and women carrying baskets of God-Knows-What. It would have been an added bonus if Poncho Villa were featured on the walls somewhere, but we weren’t getting our hopes up. When we walked in, we were dismayed to see that it was a typical campus bar with the default beers (I’d worked up a craving for Negra Modelo, so this was a very strong blow) and little hint of joyful Mexican hospitality. The walls were colored in purple, green, and a strange off-dull-yellow color that I don’t believe I’d be able to see in nature.
The Student let out one of what I considered his trademarked sighs (they possessed a unique, heavy, thoroughly disappointed quality) and said, “Bienvenidos, muchachos. For table six?” in a faux-Mexican accent.
I patted him on the back and said, “There, there, Juan. There, there.”
The Traveler, unfazed by the dearth of Mexicanness, walked to a table, glanced at the menu and went to the bar. The rest of us dragged another table to the one he chose, and glared at the menu. “I bet this shit comes with black pudding,” said The Drunkard.
“Black pudding doesn’t exist,” said The Writer.
“Oh?”
“Yes,” responded The Writer. “It’s a cultural misconception. Really, Drunkard, I thought you would have been smart enough to realize that, England being a civilized country, they wouldn’t eat fried blood.”
“Actually,” said the Student, “black pudding’s still around.”
I glanced at The Stalker, expecting to see him licking his lips at the mention of fried blood, but he merely watched the proceedings with his hands in his hoodie and an eyebrow raised.
“Lies,” responded The Writer.
The Student shook his head. “Go down to Wetherspoon’s. On their breakfast menu, you’ll see that you get a serving of black pudding with the English Breakfast. Just because a country has modern buildings and—well, semi-modern roads doesn’t mean they’re above tradition, Writer.”
“Yeah,” said the Drunkard. “You might want to lay off being a wiseass from time to time. Might be tempted to toss you in the fire tonight.”
The Writer snorted. “Oh, yes, I’m truly afraid.”
The Drunkard leaned forward and said, just above a whisper, “Crackle, crackle goes the fire, motherfucker.” He hung his jacket up on the back of his chair and went to place his order at the bar.
The Writer turned towards me, “Narrator, he wouldn’t toss me in the fire, would he?”
I shrugged.
“Damn you,” he said, “give me an answer. Shrugging isn’t an answer, shrugging is putting off an answer. It’s a ‘maybe!’ I hate maybes!”
The Stalker said, “I just might help him,” and walked to the bar.
“Et tu, Student? Will you throw me in the fire?”
“You keep on referencing Shakespeare in common conversation, I just might.” He put his jacket on the back of his chair, shook his head, said, “Utter schmuck,” and went to the bar to order.
The Writer turned back to me. “And you?”
“I’m Switzerland,” I said. Now, it was my turn to go to the bar.
I ordered a chile con carne enchilada and a Mexican-style beer called Sol. I got the beer and realized something was missing. As the rest of my group went to the table, I stood at the bar, looking confused until someone came back to me. He was a tall, built guy with his hair gelled up to the very odd hairstyle prevalent in this country that I can only describe as the crest of an exotic bird; he wore his Union polo with the collar popped, and I blame these two things for the occurrences that followed. “Hey mate, you all right?”
“Welcome back,” sang a voice in my head. “You thought it was your ticket out.” I shook it off. “Um, yeah. There’s no lime in here.”
“Yeah,” he said.
“Welcome back,” sang the voice again. “There should be a lime.”
“No mate, there shouldn’t be one.”
“It’s a Mexican beer,” I reasoned, “there should be a lime.”
“Which one of us is behind the bar? I think I should know a little more than you about beer.”
“Ba-ba-ba, Bar-bar-Barino,” John Travolta sang in my head. Suddenly, I felt my head snap back. I was back in Brooklyn. Horshack was there. Epstein was there. More importantly, all sense of social decorum, kindness, love for my fellow man, and tact imploded. “Look here, motherfucker,” I said, virtually shouting for no reason. “You keep pulling this superior shit on me, and I will leap the fuck over this bar and smash your Goddamn head in, capiche?”
The man had the audacity to snort. “Mate, a guy like you, I’d be surprised if he could leap over a stick.”
Well, I had to prove him wrong. I leapt over the bar, put him in a headlock, and said, “Listen: You know anyone workin at K-Bar? Motherfucker in a neck brace?”
The man gurgled.
“Answer me, asswipe.”
“Yes,” he choked.
“That was me. I put him in that neck brace. Now, I don’t know your English customs over here, so maybe I’m out of line. Maybe you should treat your customers like shit, thinking you can handle it all cause you got some fuckin namby pamby accent. But, brother, you think your shit don’t stink? I will take that bottle of Sol, stick it up your ass, and prove to you, once and for all, that your shit stinks.
“So here’s what you’re gonna do: I’m gonna let you go, and you’re gonna write a letter. A missal, if you will. And you’ll address it to your manager, detailing what a gigantic prick you are and requesting that you get some lessons in Goddamn courtesy. After this, you’re gonna go get me a nice, sliced lime to put in my drink so I don’t get the dry fuckin heaves every time I take a sip of Mexican piss beer. You get me, pal?”
The man nodded.
I let him go, walked around to the front of the bar, cleared my throat, and said, “Thank you.”
He took out some paper and penned the most impressive confession of arrogance I had ever seen. After I read through it, I nodded, saw that he put it up on the corkboard near the back, and got a slice of lime for my beer. “Now listen,” I said, coming out of the Brooklyn accent a little bit. “I’m gonna come back later tonight, and if I don’t see that letter still up there, then we’re gonna have trouble. Understand me?”
The man nodded.
I looked around and saw that most of the bar was staring at me. I gave them a wave and what I considered a winning smile. I took the receipt for my food and beer, walked back to the table, and sat down.
The group stared at me. “What?” I asked.
“You ever consider therapy?” asked The Traveler. “That’s not the display of a sane and well-balanced man.”
“The last well-balanced man in my family,” I responded, “was run over by a horse-and-carriage three months after arriving in this country. As a rule, we try be as unbalanced and mad as humanly possible—all in an attempt to stave off death, mind you.”
“That,” said The Student, “may be the dumbest thing I have ever heard.”
“I never made any claim in regards to my intelligence.”
The food arrived much sooner than I had hoped it would—for seeing your food arrive after five minutes is always a sign that it has been sitting in a refrigerator, waiting for someone’s order to set it free. Still, the food looked fine, with one exception: They had Englished up the Tex-Mex.
Now, chances are that my readers will know what I mean by ‘Tex-Mex.’ There is the main part of the dish—enchiladas, for example—followed by some sort of side, usually rice or beans. In the case of my current whereabouts, I assumed that beans were something the British could get a handle on. (Beans for breakfast were seen as a normal thing in this country.) However, they put chips near the enchiladas. Chips, that thoroughly British food staple, that cuisine to which they clung as if it were more important than their monarch. This may seem like over exaggeration, but I issue a challenge to those doubting readers: Go to a British-supremacy website—anything run by the British National Party will do—and view the absurd amount of comments decrying the “Chinky” or the “Paki” and instead hoisting up the “good British chippy.” For example, there was one comment that read, “Sometimes, my mates want to go down to the Chinky for food. I tell them, ‘No thanks, lads. Just drop me off at the chippy.”
Anyway, they tossed chips in with the Tex-Mex. I stared, gaping-mouthed, glaring at the bizarre and eldritch concoction which lay before me. I looked around, saw that my companions were munching away on their burgers, tacos, and quesadillas without showing any signs that the chips also residing on their plates were alien. The Drunkard looked up, saw me and said, “What’s up?”
“There are chips on my Tex-Mex.”
“Yeah,” he said. He took a swig from his Sol. He had no lime.
He had no lime. I jumped up from my chair, pointed at him and said, “You’re Hellenizing! You’re assimilating! Have you no pride? Have you forgotten where you come from? You have no lime in your Sol and you are happily eating chips with your God-damned Tex-Mex! Dear Lord, Drunkard, I be—”
The Traveler stood up and pushed me down by my shoulders. “You need to shut up,” he said. “This is just Tex-Mex. It’s not a big deal. Look, take a bite.”
I did so.
“It’s not even good Tex-Mex, is it?”
I shook my head. The food was bland. The cheese was different, more—I don’t know, plasticky. The beef, while definitely beef and possessing the typical properties that beef was supposed to have, was lackluster. It was bland. It was… English. “No,” I said. “It’s not.”
“Okay,” said The Traveler. “What is it then? It’s English. This is English Tex-Mex. They’re five thousand miles away from good Tex-Mex; you can’t expect them to get it right. What you need to do is calm down, enjoy yourself, and eat.” He returned to his plate. “And get laid. You’re way too tense, man.”
I ate, but didn’t really enjoy it. The Traveler was right, though. I was tense. I was bored. The little schoolwork I had—consisting of reading a book a week for my Ranting in Literature course, and thinking in general for my Philosophy of Life course—was not exactly fulfilling. I needed something else to occupy my time. Right then, I figured it would either be a job or… well, something else. But that was for another time. Right now, I had the bland Tex-Mex in front of me.
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