I Suck at Girls (11 page)

“We can’t start making excuses not to party,” Ryan said, insistently.

“What are you talking about? I’m here. I’m ready to party.”

“No. You just said, ‘People dance really weird here,’” he replied.

“They do. I’m just making an observation. Here’s another one: That fat guy has a lot of hot girls around him. Just an observation,” I said.

“That fat guy is partying. You stand around talking about how weird people are, and you’ll end up doing that the whole night. I do it, too. But we can’t do that shit,” Ryan said, his eyes growing wilder as he talked.

“What are you, my coach? I don’t need you to give me a speech, dude.”

“Yes, you do! Because I spent
all my money
to come to this place, dude. Did you know I was saving up to buy a dune buggy? But I didn’t buy one. Instead I came here. To party.”

“Why were you saving up to buy a dune buggy? Where would you even ride that?”

“I was gonna ride it to school or something. I don’t know. It doesn’t matter because I can’t buy one now. But what I
can
do is fucking party, in the partiest party place in the world. Vietnam Joe is off somewhere in Spain and he speaks like two words of English and he’s making sweet love to women and shit.”

Ryan removed three minibottles of vodka from his pockets and unscrewed their caps. “Let’s do this,” he said, then tilted his head back and poured all three down his throat one after the other. I took out three bottles of Captain Morgan’s and did the same, fighting the urge to throw them back up.

“Also, everyone here seems like they’re into rich guys. So, if anyone asks you, I’m telling people my dad invented the calculator watch, and my name is Brian Waters,” he said as he tossed the empty bottles into a trash can. “Who are you?” he asked.

“Hmm. I don’t know.”

“I like the name Robert C. Manufas. I mean, it’s your call, but I’m just saying I like that one.”

“How about this: I’m Robert C. Manufas and I own an Internet company that helps people find tax loopholes?”

“Hell, yeah,” he said giving me a high five.

We each downed one more tiny bottle of liquor and strode confidently back into the club. Ryan grabbed Eloisa, who was standing where we’d left her, and walked out onto the dance floor. I spotted Anetta out on the floor, making out with a tall guy in a white jumpsuit with the zipper opened down to his belly button, revealing his shaved chest. I stood on the periphery of the dance floor for a few moments. I have never been what you would call “a good dancer.” I have one move: reaching my arms out wide, leaning back, and lurching my chest forward to the rhythm of the music, like a guy being shot repeatedly in the back. But that night, I pushed that move to its absolute limits.

The only way I could even keep track of time passing was that every so often a giant cloud of freezing vapor would blast from the corner of the room, making it impossible to see your hand in front of your face for a few seconds. Ryan drank all of his tiny bottles of liquor, and most of mine, and spent what felt like several hours carrying Eloisa on his shoulders and challenging other couples to chicken fights until security insisted he stop. I danced till seven in the morning with anyone who made the mistake of making eye contact with me.

Toward the end of the night, I was dancing with a tall, rangy blond woman who looked like she was in her late twenties. After an extended grinding session, she pulled me outside onto the upstairs balcony, where I noticed that the sky was becoming light.

“You’re fucking intense,” she said, then pounded an entire bottle of water, most of which ran down her chin and chest and onto her white tank top.

“Just dancing,” I replied.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

“Robert C. Manufas,” I said, sticking to my script, then realizing no one ever says his full name and middle initial when answering that question.

“Do you have any E on you?” she asked.

“Ecstasy? No.”

“Shit. Let’s do shots of 151.”

And that was the last thing I remembered.

The next day, at five
P.M
., I woke up in a bunk bed in our hostel. Ryan was sleeping facedown on the floor in just his underwear, the rest of his clothes balled up beneath his head like a pillow. Eloisa and Anetta were spooning each other in bed across the room. Ryan rolled over and looked at me.

“I think I blacked out,” I said with a hoarse voice.

“Do you remember going out into the middle of the dance floor and challenging people to dance battles?” he asked, rubbing his eyes slowly.

“No. How did I do?”

“Mostly people just yelled at you. Then you stole a knife from the bartender and cut your sleeves off. Then the bartender asked for it back and you started making body builder poses and then ran away. So that was pretty awesome.”

I smiled in victory and then realized I felt worse than I’d ever felt in my life. I sat up—a little too quickly, I guess, because I immediately projectile-vomited into an empty bag of chips. I went to wipe my mouth on my missing shirtsleeves, and ended up rubbing my puke onto my bare biceps.

“What do we do now?” I asked Ryan between sips of a water bottle I found next to me.

Ryan handed me a rolled-up piece of toilet paper, then took a moment to recover from the effort. Between deep breaths, he said, “We do it again.”

And we did. The next night was almost identical. The only differences were, the club we went to was called Amnesia, which threw a “Purple Party” instead of a white one; my fake name was Peter Schlesinger and I sold yachts; I made out with a strange woman who asked me for cocaine instead of ecstasy; and I woke up the next morning feeling even worse than I had the morning before. Also, my underwear was on over my pants.

With two full nights in Ibiza under our belts, the four of us checked out of our hostel and boarded a boat back to Barcelona. I felt a sense of accomplishment. I had gone to Europe in hopes of becoming someone I was never able to be back home, and I was sure that, if I could be more like the guy I’d been for the past two days, my life would be infinitely better. I also felt really bloated. My stomach was hard to the touch; it looked like I was in my second trimester. I was exhausted, so I went inside the main cabin of the ship and plopped myself down in one of the couple hundred seats, shut my eyes, and fell asleep.

About four hours later my eyes shot open. It felt like I’d swallowed a rat that was now trying to claw its way up through my intestines to freedom. I tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t; instead I ended up just sitting awake, slumped over in my chair, until we finally arrived at Barcelona nine hours later, just as the sun came up. When I tried explaining my agony to Ryan, who is not a “believer” in traditional medicine, he offered a theory of his own: “I bet you it’s because of the frequencies in this ocean. Your cells probably aren’t used to these frequencies.”

“I don’t think that’s it,” I replied, weakly.

I tried ignoring the pain, and I made it to the train station, where we boarded our train for Madrid. By the time we reached our hostel there a few hours later, though, I could barely stand up. The room we got for the night was windowless and felt at least fifteen degrees hotter than the temperature outside, which was well over a hundred. I collapsed on the bed closest to the door and curled into the fetal position in hopes I’d feel better, but as I moved my legs toward my chin I felt a stabbing pain shoot through my stomach and up into my chest.

“Ry, I need to go to the emergency room,” I moaned.

“I think you’re gonna be okay. You’re away from the ocean now and its weird frequencies,” he replied.

“Ry. I need to go to the emergency room right now, man.”

Ryan nodded and gingerly lifted me out of bed. I slung one arm around him as he helped me downstairs and out onto the street, where we hailed a cab. About ten minutes later I was sitting in the waiting area of an emergency room when a nurse approached us and said something in Spanish that neither Ryan or I could understand.

“What is hurt?” she finally sputtered in broken English.

“I think the frequencies of the ocean have messed with his cells,” Ryan said.

“My stomach hurts,” I said.

“Point where,” she said.

I gestured toward my entire stomach area and she nodded. Five minutes later she led me to a private room, where she started an IV in my left arm. Twenty minutes later I was standing in front of an X-ray machine.

The X-ray technician rattled off some directions in Spanish and I figured out from the key words that he wanted me to take off my clothes. Then I realized from the look on his face that at no point had he asked me to take off my underwear. I pulled them back up as quickly as I could, which in my pathetic condition wasn’t very quickly at all. After he snapped a couple X-rays, I waited with Ryan until the nurse brought us into a small office where the doctor, a young woman in scrubs and a white lab coat, sat behind a desk, a set of X-rays spread out in front of her.

“No hables español, si?”
she said.

“Not really,” I said.

“Okay. I try explain in English,” she replied as she held up an X-ray in front of us.

“Your stomach is very mad. It do not work. Here,” she said, pointing to two dark areas under my ribcage. “This is, ah …” she added, then turned to the nurse and rattled off a question in Spanish.

The nurse picked it up where the doctor had left off. “Ah, I know this is not most correct but for understand—too much poo poo and fart,” she said, pointing at the dark spots on the X-ray.

“That was the most awesome diagnosis I’ve ever heard in my life,” Ryan said.

“Thank you,” the nurse said without a hint of humor.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“You got too many poo poos and farts in your stomach, dude. That’s pretty clear,” Ryan said, laughing.

“Have you eat drugs?” the doctor asked.

“No. Not at all.”

“Alcohol?”

“Yes. A lot.”

“We went to Ibiza,” Ryan interjected.

The nurse and the doctor exchanged brief but satisfied smirks, as if they’d been placing bets on Ibiza.

“Okay, Justin,” the doctor continued. “Some people, they are very good at alcohol, and they go to many discos, and it is okay. Some people, they are very bad at alcohol, and it is not good for them discos, and they are good at sitting. You are good at sit down.”

She went on to tell me that, because of the drastic change in my lifestyle over the past forty-eight hours, my stomach had reacted violently and basically stopped working. Constipation and a buildup of gas were causing all the pain. She said I wouldn’t really be able to walk around for the next few days, then handed me a prescription to alleviate the blockage and pain. I thanked her profusely and we left the emergency room and hobbled next door to the pharmacy.

As I rifled around in my wallet, preparing to pay the bill, I noticed my prepaid calling card and remembered that I owed my parents a call. After settling up, Ryan and I took a cab back to our hostel room where, exhausted, I sat down and dialed my parents’ number. The phone picked up after one ring.

“It’s four thirty in the fucking morning,” my dad said.

“Oh, sorry, I forgot.”

“Well who in the hell is this?”

“It’s Justin, Dad.”

“Justin? You sound like shit run over, son.”

“Yeah, I’m not feeling well.”

“Not feeling well how?” he said, his voice quickening with concern.

“Okay, well, don’t tell Mom because she’ll freak out, and I’m gonna be fine, but I just had to go to the emergency room.”

“Aw, hell. For what?”

I explained everything I’d done in the past couple days: Ibiza, the minibottles of booze, the stomach pains, the X-rays, right down to the prescription I’d just been given. He listened quietly until I was finished.

“Can I make a suggestion?” he asked.

“Sure.”

“Maybe next time you’re thinking about getting shithouse drunk all night, you don’t.”

“Dad, I barely ever drink.”

“Yeah, that’s my point. You can’t hold your liquor for shit. So maybe drinking a whole bunch of it and shaking your ass ain’t your thing.”

“We were just having a good time and trying to meet people, you know?”

“Well, you don’t need to get shithoused and go to Europe to do that. You’re over six feet tall and your mom says you’re funny. I’d say run with those two things and see where it gets you.”

We said good-bye just as my calling card was about to run out of minutes. Then I sat down on my bed, and, for what felt like the first time in days, I fell asleep.

A week later, Ryan and I were in Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, waiting to board our flight back home. My stomach was feeling infinitely better, although I was still relatively weak and couldn’t walk more than a few blocks without having to sit down. We had an hour before our flight took off, so I decided to check my e-mail at an Internet kiosk in the terminal. At the top of my inbox was an e-mail from Vietnam Joe:

Justin, I hope you have a great trip. I am using Vietnamese to English translation, so I apologize if there is incorrect grammar. I had a great time and met many very attractive women. I am on a good streak that I want to say that meeting you and Ryan and I thinkyou are very great man. You must know a lot of attractive women. I hope to go out with you all one day when I came to the United States. I want to meet the women you know. I will not steal from you. Oh no I can not promise!

Joe

A Man Takes His Shots and Then He Scrubs the Shit out of Some Dishes

Between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, each of my friends lost his virginity. One by one they fell, until finally, at the age of twenty, my friend Jeff and I were the only virgins left. I was in my second year of college and lived in a run-down five-bedroom house in Pacific Beach, San Diego, with Jeff and three other close friends. The morning after a party we threw celebrating the end of the first semester, I stumbled out of my bedroom and found my roommates hanging out in the grease-stained kitchen.