Travels with Henry (Part 2)

“Dude, Henry, are you cool man?” I asked him.

“Tanggggled up in bluuuueee...she was-a-married when we first met, soon to be divorrrrrced,” he sang back to me. Then, standing up straight, “Yeah, it’s all good.” He was giggling like a son-of-a-bitch now, laughing at everything Rachel was saying, trying hopelessly to share some random anecdotes with the teetotalers we just bumped into.

After grabbing some food, we found ourselves in a series of bars, pubs and dives. The entire sequence of events between 9:00 and midnight was a blur. We must’ve run into our friends who lived downtown, because I suddenly noticed we were rolling about 11 deep. We started chanting “Sweet Caroline” on the way to a pub, throwing in the “dun-dun-duns” and the “so good, so good, so good” interludes. A few of the kids (who started a little bit...scratch that...way wayyyyy too early), stumbling around like a pack of three-legged dogs looking for sympathetic owners, called it quits around then and took a later bus back. For most of us though, the night was still young. My cell phone read 11:58 PM as we exited a very cool bar that I promised myself I’d remember how to get back to.

Obviously I got lost going down that way the next week.

We were eventually heading through Temple Bar, which if you’ve spent more than four days in Dublin-town, you’ll know is filled with tourists, English and American usually, trying to get a grip on reality through a very intense chemically-induced haze. What’s more, around St. Patrick’s Day, the scene down there is like that kicked up two dozen notches, with everyone wearing funny hats, scarves, and shirts proclaiming “I’m Irish and I like to fuck” or something along those lines. On this particular Saturday, there were 16-year old girls swigging green beer, people with heavy English accents trying to ask you directions through a slew of mispronounced verbs and nouns, and Americans screaming “Born in the U.S.A.” It was a lot like that Mardi Gras scene from Easy Rider where Captain America and Billy drop acid and start to see all kinds of crazy shit happening with the floats and people wearing wacked-out costumes on Bourbon Street. Overwhelming. Of course, we all realized that we were more sober than half of the people out that night.

“Henry, I think these fuckers are more tanked than we are,” I belched, killing the back half of a pint someone handed me as we waded through the crowds.

“Yeahhhhh, tanked motherfuckers. Let’s go! Porterhouse! Gin and tonics! It’s what the cool kids are doing!” he replied, half of the time trying to join the bizarre crowd that engulfed us.

“Good call, but it’s gonna take us a year to get through this mess of people.”

Rachel chimed in: “You guys need to stop being such bitches. Let’s go, right now. I can get us there.” Thankfully, this girl could drink and she could navigate. Within eight minutes, we were sitting at one of the four bars in the Porterhouse, pint glasses in hand, waiting for the booze to really take hold.

By 12:45, Henry’d switched back to gin and was telling me about his reasons for only drinking hard alcohol.

“No, I’m only drinking gin from now on, or whiskey, because beer makes you fat. You get it, baby? And [grabbing the limited rolls on his stomach] I need to lose weight. You get it?”

“That’s bullshit, Henry. Look, that tonic water’s got a ton of sugar in it. Look at the back of your little bottle of tonic. Fuck, well, they don’t have calories on there. But you just paid like two euros for that little thing. Anyway, gin has calories, too. You know I heard a pint of Guinness only has like 150 calories.”

“Yeah, well this has like 70 calories. Read it and...oh, damn, they don’t have the calorie count on here. Shit.”

“If you’d just listen to me...”

“No! Wait, yes! Look...see...I’ll tell you about Bombay Sapphire...”

Whatever. No use arguing with a fanatic. I jumped back into the conversation with Joe that’d became heated and somehow gotten back to On the Road. My beatnik friends were screaming at each other, loudly debating the merits of Kerouac’s two most famous sagas.

“No, you don’t get it, man. On the Road isn’t Kerouac’s master-work. The Dharma Bums is—I mean that’s the ultimate thing, like at the end, when he goes up on that mountain for 40 days alone. It’s a test of his will, you know?” Mikey was yelling this, attracting a crowd of several Americans who wanted to argue the point harder than he did.

“Shit, Mikey, that’s bullshit man!” some guy yelled.

“Fuck you!”

“Don’t give me that,” Joe screamed back. “On the Road is a staple of pop culture, I mean those parts in Denver were just mind-blowing...”

And on and on. Joe and Mikey were practically leading a class discussion on Beat Generation lit, and I wasn’t in the mood to dig too deeply into that scene. That’s a conversation better left for dorm room lava-lamp watching with Dark Side of Oz in the background. In the middle of a bar on St. Patty’s Day, forget that crap.

Since Henry was everyone’s favorite kid, he was buying every girl in the place drinks. Rachel and one of her friends were kissing up on both of his cheeks after every beer or shot he bought them, and he just kept throwing shit on his American Express card like prohibition was making its way across the Atlantic. It was approaching 2 AM, and the drunken Yanks around us were asking for “Voka/Re-boos” instead of “Vodka Red Bulls.” Finally, Henry pulled out his card to pick up a few more beers, put it down, and turned away for a second to speak to someone about a class project he was working on.

“Look, this lady’s gonna give us a fucking A on this thing, man. Me and Tom got the whole system figured out. We’re arguing that the Iraq War was completely just. Let me tell you about this article...”

But, in the midst of his stupor, one of Rachel’s roommates proceeded to take off with his card (I think she asked first?) and started ordering. Beers, shots, mixers, whatever; Henry’s old man was gonna pick up the tab for everyone. His dad was probably just waking up to a nice Sunday breakfast only to find, as he approached his computer, that his son just put $200 worth of booze on his account, and he’d be regretting ever telling his son that the card was “for emergencies only.”

It was at this point that she flicked his credit card right into the trashcan and the night needed to end. The bar was overflowing with sweaty, rainsoaked twenty-somethings shoving up against us on every side. Henry, when he saw the card incident, clearly went a little crazy talking to Liz. Even though I tried to calm him down, he went forth with his mission to reclaim his Platinum Amex. She didn’t know what to say to this exchange:

“Seriously, Liz, that was my dad’s credit card.” She tried to interject, but he just kept rolling, saying over and over, “You threw it in the trash, look, look in there, I know it’s in the goddamn trashcan. What the fuck? NO, SERIOUSLY, WHAT THE HELL??!?”

Liz was beyond befuddled. When the nicest kid on the program comes up to you, reeking of juniper berries, demanding you dig into a trashcan to find his card, you take a couple of steps back. Then, you realize there are some things you can’t take seriously.

“Henry, it’s fine. You should probably go home,” Liz said, not taking here eyes off the jacked bartender pouring everyone shots.

He came back my way, avoiding her, hoping to God he’d find that card before he’d have to call his dad in the middle of the night asking him to cancel it for the third time in two months.

I could only imagine that exchange.

The first two times were no big deal: “Sorry dad, I got pick-pocketed in Prague. I couldn’t do anything.” “Sorry dad, I left it at a bar. Nothing happened though, it was a Tuesday night, I’m sure no one paid for anything on it. Yeah, okay, so we spent like $30 on beers. The exchange rate is rough.”

This one wouldn’t work out so well: “Sorry dad, after I bought like six rounds of drinks, some girl just snaked it and started ordering a bunch of shit on it. Oh, by the way, can you put another two grand in my account? We’re leaving for Berlin tomorrow. You know my address here, right?”

After I gave him a stern-talking-to, Henry finally coaxed one of the nicer bartenders to dig his credit card out of the shitbag. As he held it between his thumb and pointer, the thing dripping with God-knows-what, we knew it was time to go and get some pizza. We ran across the street, each of us devoured a large, and we took cabs back to our apartments.

“Thank Christ I got that thing back,” Henry muttered, almost falling asleep in the back of the taxi. “My dad might’ve made me fly home after that one.”

“Shut the fuck up, Henry,” Rachel and Liz babbled in unison. I woke all of them up once we made it back to our apartments and paid the fare myself. We stumbled into our respective buildings not saying more than “Uh, seeya later and shit.”

***

I felt a heavy kick on my mattress at about 1 PM the next afternoon. Henry and I got out of bed, both fully clothed from the night before with “Tell the Truth” blaring out of my laptop. I fumbled through my pockets, thankfully found my wallet and phone, and looked through crumpled up receipts from the food-and-bar tab from the night before that was hellishly large to say the least. Henry’s tab was more than twice what mine was. I heard mumblings of “shit” and “fuck” as we banged out the door to grab some Gatorades and Pringles.

We weaved our way through minimal crowds to the convenience store just off campus. And then we weaved our way through the aisles at TESCO, wandering through the beer aisle (yeah, we grabbed a six pack of Carlsberg), then the bread aisle, then slammed into a few shelves of diapers before we got our bearings. When we finally got the necessities, Henry pulled out the Amex and slurred, “Don’t worry, I got you bud.”

“Thanks boss.”

“Forget it. God, that was a long fucking night.”

“It’s good you found that nice bartender to dig through the trash to get that back to you, boss.”

“What do you mean?”

“Uhhh...dude, you told Liz that because she stole your dad’s card she had to fish it out of the trashcan. You seemed adamant about that. You thought your dad would have to cancel it again.”

“What? Oh hell, did I call him?”

“No, no! You almost lost the card, though, don’t you remember when it got pitched into the trash?”

“Well, yeah, but fuck...”

“Liz, she took it from you, bought a ludicrous last-call round of drinks.”

“What? Oh, Christ, yeah. Liz, some people’ve got no respect, you hear me? No respect!”

“You don’t even...”

“Yeah, you’re right, the whole goddamn thing’s a...total fuckshit. Did I ever tell you about this hangover cure? Two cans of Pringles and three Gatorades. I’ll be functioning better than ever in no time.” He pulled a receipt out of his pocket. “Oh God. I hope my dad lets this one go!”

We went back to our rooms and laid around watching Freaks and Geeks for a few hours. My stomach felt like I’d just ingested a Super Size Me amount of McDonalds, and I wasn’t looking to leave the couch until about 8:30 that night. Henry went back to bed somewhere in the middle of the afternoon and I didn’t see him until 11:00 the next morning. He was still feeling the effects of his Humphrey Bogart-inspired night when we got to the airport that day for a flight to other parts of Europe.

Right now, I’m still feeling the effects of that night. Face it—studying abroad is an intense vacation schools pawn off on a lot of people as a tremendous learning experience that apparently makes you a more intelligent, interesting, and marketable student. But really, it’s this simple: if you have the means to leave college for a few months, you do it. Don’t get me wrong. My time in Ireland was unquestionably one of the finest four-month stints of my life. I traveled all over Europe, I tried great food, drank amazing wine, met some of my best friends, and went to class only half as much as I would’ve had to if I’d stayed in the U.S. And after doing enough time at a liberal arts college, confined to a ten block radius, I think I needed that vacation. Call me spoiled, but it's the truth.

Of course, I have friends who swear to the Holy Father that their abroad experiences meant “so much to them” and were a “total learning experience” and “gave them so much insight into other cultures.” The jury’s still out. One of my best friends learned to speak another language almost fluently which is unbelievably cool and completely useful. I guess for some people, it can be pretty transformative, especially if you spend 10 or 11 months amid a completely unfamiliar people. “Life changing”? Maybe. Going to the post office is life-changing if you meet your future wife there buying stamps. “Broadening your horizons”? I’m still dubious when people spew that tripe.

I guess for a small minority, the travel abroad experience brings an expanded worldview, but for most of us, it’s just Freedom that we’re after. All of my friends, at one point or another, were reading Kerouac during the trip, and as Joe, Mikey, Henry and I sat drinking a couple bottles of wine the way Ray Smith from Dharma Bums would’ve, we discussed the whole thing. We agreed that, at that specific moment in time, every day was liberating and exciting, never knowing what you’d end up doing from one week to the next.

Freedom comes with a hefty price tag and thankfully our parents were willing to foot the bill.

It’s clear that we didn’t understand a fucking thing. The whole Kerouac-inspired phenomenon lasted a few short months, but we were really more like Albert Brooks and his yuppie wife in Lost in America. In that pic, Brooks and Julie Haggerty (his spouse) kept babbling about Easy Rider and freedom. As yuppies, they looked at Easy Rider as a guiding light, but they had a “nest-egg” (i.e. $190,000) to live off of. Obviously it was the same with us. None of us were like Sal Paradise. We’d nothing to do with the legacy of Captain America. We never panhandled and we sure as hell never sold coke to Phil Spector to fund a two week getaway. In all, we were only luckier than Brooks and Haggerty because no one ever gambled away our cash in Vegas. We just got to feed off of our parents’ nest-eggs the whole time.

I stayed in touch with Henry. He’s still more grounded than I am, so when we’re chatting, our conversation always turns back to the nights in Dublin where we talked constantly about some idea of freedom and tried to live it. He got serious with a girl in Dublin soon after That Night, though. And then he snagged a job after graduation and started seeing another lady. So, all we’ve got now are simply memories of being unencumbered and stupidly happy. It’s all pretty much a dying part of his life. But for me, it’s something I’m hanging on to and still blathering about. I sit looking at my journal from the spring of ’08 realizing I can’t get the goddamn trip out of my head. Memories of street corners, shitty food, pubs, running to catch a bus, and babbling about philosophy still pique my senses. Nest-egg or not, I’m stuck in the past.

I lived the next year and a half of my life after Dublin in that same faux-Freedom haze, just hanging out with friends, moving from party to party to bar to party, knowing the college grading system well, and doing just enough to keep my GPA around a 3.6 or 3.7. I woke up during senior week the day after I took my last final, and found, to my surprise, that I’d made Dean’s List and graduated Magna. My thoughts at the time still came back to that clichéd Talking Heads lyric...you know it...“Well, how did I get here?” I still ponder that same damn question right now.

Really, who knows how I got there? All of this feels like a fantasy, 15 months I won’t ever forget. Even as I thought I was being responsible during that Freedom period in my life, keeping up grades, not missing (much) class, writing A papers professors called ‘analytical’ and ‘thoughtful’ and ‘well-researched’, the whole ordeal seems like some wonderful recurring dream. Yet it quickly ends like this: you receive your diploma in late May, shake the college president’s hand, and watch the assembly line of black-gowned graduates in front and back of you smiling, waving, shouting. When you take your seat among the masses, the grin rapidly turns to a furrowed brow, and everyone sits with lips pursed, eyes shifting rapidly, the “holy-fucking-shit” impulse trapped in their bellies.

Then one thing becomes abundantly clear: you’ll never be able to go back. Sure, you’ll make it back for one alumni weekend, one senior week excursion, and an impromptu weekend when you’re 25, realizing you’re way too old to get black-out drunk three days in a row. Your old idea of Freedom will be nothing but a memory by then. The nest-egg is all but fucked. You’ll finally realize Kerouac drank himself to a hideous death at only 47-years old. Things will never be the same again.

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Mark of a Dive Bar (Part 1)

“And it feels right as you lock up your house/Turn out the lights, and step out into the night/And the world is busting at its seams/And you’re just a prisoner of your dreams/Holding on for your life, ‘cause you work all day/To blow ‘em away in the night.” –Bruce Springsteen, “Night” (1975)

Springsteen analyzed blue-collar existence to the core on most of his records: Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ, The Wild, the Innocent, and the E-Street Shuffle, Born to Run, Darkness on the Edge of Town. The first four albums were absolute masterpieces. He’s right about a few things in “Night,” except, for me, the “work all day” thing is bogus. In my case, it’s more like “get off the couch/to not do shit in the night.” You don’t meet girls at these dive bars described so eloquently by Springsteen and his other contemporaries like Southside Johnny. You step out into the night for one reason: to get housed. It’s what everyone else in the place is doing whether they’re sitting by themselves nursing that fifth scotch-rocks or yelling at their friends chugging their ninth pitcher.

You’re used to dive bars in a small college town, especially before graduation. They’re the shittiest bars you’ve ever been in, but you love them just the same. The fucking pre-yuppie bars are irritating—20 minute waits to get drinks, sorority girls all pretending they’re best friends while gossip spreads behind everyone’s back, and guys in lavender pants trying to spit game through half a dozen Jagerbombs. You can only handle that shit for ten minutes, tops.

The place my buddies and I hung out at in school was a fucking dive. It had a few pool tables, cheap beer ($5.00 Yuengling pitchers...enough said), and the overwhelming stench of smoke. Cheap wallpaper, cigarette machines, broken bathroom sinks, the works. After we’d get bored at this place, we’d hit up another bar that was a little classier, but had pretty much all the same attributes—pool tables, locals drinking well bourbon, everyone watching a baseball game and bitching at the TV, a bartender who looked like he’d been working there for at least thirty years. We had great times even though we pre-supposed we’d be leaving the whole dive bar scene behind after graduation. I didn’t.

If you think eventually you’ll be living in New York going to amazing cigar bars, well, you’re kind of out of luck. Some kids got there. I even do every couple of months when I visit my buddies there. But, like many kids looking for jobs in a bad economy, I moved back home, took my seat on the couch, and haven’t done a lot of moving since.

Living in the suburbs isn’t all bad, except for the fact that you’ve gotta start frequenting all the same dive bars you used to try to sneak into in high school and the ones you went to when you were home on breaks in college. The dives at school were great because you knew all the bouncers, bartenders, and girls. But the bars at home aren’t like that since you’ve essentially been on a four-year hiatus. In the ‘burbs, you’re faced with two choices: the expensive bars your parents go to for after-dinner drinks (and the ones you stop by with your elitist friend who goes to Yale) or the shitty bars you always end up at after two hours of debating what you’ll do on a Friday night.

Everyone who’s had to go back to their parents’ basements has had to revisit those bars, some for longer than others. I’ve found about four or five bars in my area that I absolutely adore, though. And whenever we end up arguing about going out at night, we always narrow the list to these same places, even if your one friend suggests that for “a change of pace” you trek twenty miles away to hit that bar with $6.00 beers and shot girls that are “totally hot.” Or that club with a bunch of gel-heads who think bottle service makes them part of some elite group. Fuck that shit, man. I love dive bars. Going to clubs, especially back in my neck of the woods, is enough to induce dry heaves.

From what I’ve gathered from being at home unemployed, and from my buddies who are in similar suburban living situations dealing with the same terrible economy, we’ve found that there are a few types of crap bars. Though you’ll get my unique “stories” here, these are the kinds of places you’ll come across while you’re searching for meaningful existence. You’re not living the dream. And hell, you might even end up working at one of these joints while you try to get your shit together. Here we go:

1. The Neighborhood Bar

My neighborhood bar is one of my favorites in the area. Why? I can drink as much as I want and still make it back to my place and end up safely in bed without any thoughts of getting a DUI.* In fact, it’s usually the last stop after a night of drinking before we end up in my buddy’s garage smoking hookah and having a couple of Elijah Craig’s on the rocks.

There’s a great assortment of people at the neighborhood bar, but it doesn’t cater to one specific kind of person. No Guidos. No Hipsters. No hippies. Just real Topeka people. It’s a bar that people aren’t afraid to go into by themselves because they know they’ll always find someone there to shoot the shit with. If you go every Saturday, you’ll always see the same people. It’s like Cheers with actual personality. One dude even looks like a clone of Norm Peterson.

At this bar, a “Hotel” that probably hasn’t given weary travelers comfort since like 1878, there are all sorts of strange rangers. Last week, I ran into the guy who used to be my school bus driver when I was in 10th grade. The week before that, my neighbor, a mother of two, was hitting on some black dude...until I came in the door. She was supremely glad to see me for some reason, even though the last time I talked to her (two months earlier), she was walking her dog and bitching about “snow in November.”

Every time I end up in that place, I also run into the two gay guys who sit at the end of the bar, cooing to each other and, for some reason, flirting with all of the attractive women. The girls all flock to them—they’re much better company than half of the drunk guys there who come in with beat-up jeans and t-shirts looking like they just got off a double-shift at the steel mill. Those gay guys are always better dressed than everyone—nice overcoats, button-up vests, $150 shirts, and perfectly tailored gray dress slacks or Diesel jeans. The kicker: they’re the only ones in the place allowed to dress like this. When I rolled in there to meet friends after a nice family dinner, sporting a J. Crew sweater and khakis, I got all kinds of strange looks, especially from the bouncer rocking a hoodie and cargo shorts two days after Thanksgiving.

I always end up getting to this Hotel when my buddy Barry is home for winter break. We get down there about three nights a week with a random assortment of friends. While I make it there at least once every couple of weeks when he isn’t around, I end up there bullshitting with the locals all the time when he comes back—if he calls me at midnight on a Tuesday looking to drink, I never say no. Barry’s a smoker, so if I join him outside for a butt once in awhile, we meet some interesting people. The same guys I always see there talk about random shit: football, punk bands, girls, blowjobs, what have you. And always ridiculously loudly. We ran into one guy, trying clumsily to light a Marlboro Red through a liquor-induced fog and talk simultaneously:

“Yo, you guys see the Iowa game today?” the dude asks us.

“Uhhh...no, but their defense looks pretty good this year,” Barry jokes amicably. He doesn’t know shit.

“Fucking right it does.”

“Yeah, so what’s going on man?” we’ll ask in unison.

“Nothin’, what about you guys?”

“Just havin’ a quick smoke. Reflectin’.”

“Yeah, well I live over there, you see that place right across from the post office?”

“Got it. Great place,” Barry says, not sure of where this conversation’s going.

“You guys smoke weed?”

“Uh...” We look at each other, and decide that “Once in awhile,” is a good answer for something like this.

“Well, yo, check out this piece I just picked up this week.” This dude, the Iowa fan, pulls a $100 bowl out of a Lens-Crafters case and shoves it in our face. He then proceeds to show us the quarter he bought in the last couple of days which looks like really good shit.

“Yeah, I just picked up this fucking Haze from my buddy downtown. What you think?”

“Looks fucking great,” Barry says, as I jab my elbow into his side. “Uh, I mean, looks okay, whatever.”

“Yeah, you guys wanna come hit this shit?”

“Uhhh...not really, man. We gotta go finish some beers, and we got a party going at my place in a little,” Barry lies.

“You want some coke? Is that your shit? You look like those college boys. I never made it to college, but I can tell by that polo shirt...”

Obviously shit’d gotten uncomfortable, so we just said “No, thanks.”

“Yeah, that’s cool, whatever. It’s my day off tomorrow, we got a few cases over at our place. Always lookin’ to hang out. You sure? My roommate’s sister’s in town...”

“Of course. We’ll keep it in mind.”

We run back inside, chug the rest of our beers, and get out. You’re never trying to socialize with the people you meet in dive bars, especially not in the neighborhood bar. The Iowa fan is a cool guy. His fiancé is really laid back. But we don’t want to hang with them after closing time. These local bars exist in a vacuum—you’re happy to be hanging out with people while you’re sitting there knocking back a few brew dogs, but you don’t wanna extend the relationship beyond the typical barstool conversation.

But when you’re there, things are great—people will buy you a beer for no reason (if they’re wasted enough), the drinks don’t cost shit, and there’s at least one good bar fight a month. I saw two girls beat the crap out of each other over Christmas break a year ago and when the cops showed up, the brawl didn’t subside one bit until three people got arrested. Maybe someone got tazed, but...eh...who knows. And for some reason, the people who go there, especially the 30-something burnouts, usually know good music. If you want to debate whether The Last Waltz or Woodstock was a better concert film, you’ve found your crowd. No dive bar, not even in college, measures up to the neighborhood bar that’s the only remaining part of a haunted old fleabag motel.

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*This is sort of a lie. My dad knows a guy who left my neighborhood bar about 16 beers deep, got behind the wheel, and thought he was “just fine.” An hour later, he got pulled over three towns over for driving without his headlights on. He was out-of-his-mind plastered. The kicker: he lives less than a half a mile from the bar. Instead of turning right out of the parking lot, he turned left. It’s given me a new perspective.

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Travels With Henry (Part 1)

“You're not drunk if you can lie on the floor without holding on.” –Dean Martin

“Where the motherfuck is my Amex?” Henry yelped. It was the end of the night, and we’d probably done a few too many.

“Oh, Rachel’s roommate has it, she’s ordering drinks for people,” I said, thinking Henry wouldn’t mind since he’d been buying booze for half of our program for the last hour like he had an executive expense account.

“What? Seeeeeeeeriously, man?”

“Yeah. I think so. Look...oh Christ, Henry, something happened to your card. That girl just...”

At this moment, Rachel’s roommate had just spiked Henry’s card directly onto the bar in an aggressive attempt to pay the tab. The thing ricocheted right off the counter, spiraled through the air in slo-mo, and dropped like an epic 3-pointer into the trashcan a couple feet away from the bartender. The guy at the bar didn’t notice it right away, but I definitely giggled as I saw it go down. Henry, who’d been fading fast in the past 20 minutes, cocked his head in time to see this epic game-winning shot. Horrified, he half-staggered up from his barstool, the first one of us to dare moving in a solid hour, and tried to make his way down the bar to retrieve his credit card. As he maneuvered through hectic crowds, bumping into people at the bar, he started shouting random obscenities. He’d almost calmed down when he found the girl who lost his Amex.

“What the hell did you do with my card?” he asked the girl who’d just performed an end-zone celebration by ordering 30 Euros worth of drinks and bouncing his card into a receptacle full of colossal bar tabs, empty ginger ale bottles, and every imaginable kind of liquor slushed together.

“Uh...I gave it to the bartender.” she said, defensively. She had no idea what the hell she did wrong.

“No, you threw it in the trash. I can’t fucking believe this.” Henry was trying to keep his usually easygoing demeanor...and having a really tough time. “And what did you buy with it?”

“Like...a few shots, and like a couple of drinks, and I don’t know, maybe like some beers. Like four pints.” She was eyeing Henry up warily, not sure of what his next move would be. The mood was tense. Would he throw a punch? Would he collapse on the ground and get dragged out by bouncers? Or just walk away?

“Oh, Jesus. Come on, Liz! That’s was my dad’s credit card!” Thank God! He’d kept his sense of humor.

Who said that night couldn’t bring us closer to God? Or at least closer to a trashcan in a Dublin pub...

St. Patrick’s Day in Ireland is a holiday where everyone and their brother indulges their 1/16 Irish side, flies to Dublin, and gets absolutely demolished on Guinness, Bailey’s, and Jameson. And your idiot friend always thinks it’ll be funny to order an Irish Car Bomb. When I studied in Dublin, the holiday lasted from about Thursday night to the Tuesday morning after St. Patty’s day. The bars were open later and the people were all drunker than usual (and believe me, in Dublin, this is something to write home about)—the whole thing was batshit crazy. Americans were falling all over themselves, English teens were puking in gutters in Temple Bar, and we had one hell of a good night.

Now, in Ireland, people get fucked up all the time. We met kids on our first week there who, on a Wednesday, started pregaming for a concert around noon. The show didn’t even start until ten hours later. They were drinking double-Red Bull/Vodkas when Joe and I met them, singing some traditional Irish songs, and were, to my surprise, still standing at 2 AM when they showed up at our apartment ready to do shots, two half-empty bottles of Jack in hand. By 4 AM, everyone was so trashed that one of these Irish kids tried to fight my buddy Mikey. Since Mikey is about 5’6” and skinny as fuck, we were lucky to have our 240-pound linebacker friend throw not one, but two kids, through our apartment’s front door that night. While some of these Irish kids lived like this every night, we saved up just a bit of energy to burn on St. Patty’s Day.

My best buddy and roommate in Dublin, Henry, was a pretty moderate ex-New Englander from a nice family. He was easily one of the smartest kids I knew, and was even more interesting when things got a little out of hand. On this Saturday night, a few friends from our group started out doing some light drinking—just killing a couple of Carlsberg pounders before we got on the bus to go into town and meet up at our favorite place, O’Neill’s. After we finished these tall boys up, Henry, Rachel, Joe, Mikey and I all headed into town to meet up with some other kids.

Henry announced about ten times how good of a time he was going to have that night, so we were all on the lookout for erratic behavior early on. When Henry got pretty buzzed, he was one of my absolute favorite people to be around. Within every group of friends, there’s always one kid who’s funnier than everyone else after he’s done a little over-consuming. Henry was that kid in our abroad group—he wasn’t that obnoxious, just bizarre and talkative. He would start singing Bob Dylan songs and dancing around in the streets, pirouetting like a ballerina hopped up on amphetamines, skipping (not running) from place to place at breakneck speeds: “Let’s go to McDonalds...no, let’s get Burger King! No, here, this place has really good burritos. No, seriously, they actually make good burritos in Ireland. No wait! This bar is open for another hour! Should we get another drink? How does it feeeeeeeeeeeeeel?” His speech patterns would make it seem as though he was speaking with one of us, but in fact, he was having the conversation with himself while we served as spectators.

The first bar was tame comparatively, and we were coherent, Henry included. We all started nice and easy at the bar with two or three pints apiece. After all of us slogged through our share of beer, we started getting into some Jameson to speed up the process of getting sufficiently tuned in the shortest amount of time possible. You could sense the nice mellow, woozy feeling as our conversations got louder and more political. (Joe was insisting that Travels with Charley was an altogether better road novel than On the Road, and was prepared to argue his point to the death.) While a couple of kids started ripping shots, I stuck to drinking whiskey on the rocks. In Ireland, drinking this way helps the “keeping your shit together” factor significantly since bartenders actually measure the shot out before pouring it into a tumbler. Henry was holding his own after the pints, switching at halftime to gin and tonics to ‘keep his figure’ (not a joke). I’m pretty sure that Rachel, a slim 5’2” 100% Irish dirty-blonde, was out-doing all of us, by this point covering pretty much half of the tabletop with her empty pint glasses.

I looked at my cell-phone. It was 8:30 PM.

We were likely half in the bag post our few hours of drinking, but somehow, everyone was surprisingly cogent. After getting up from our corner table, we made our way down three flights of stairs and tumbled out onto Grafton Street screaming laughing and shoving each other into walls. We ran into some kids from the program who were unfortunately stone-cold sober, so they just giggled nervously, asking us if we were “like, cool?”

I was beginning to wonder the same thing.

I’m pretty sure my whole experience abroad was an absolute escapist fantasy. Up until a month into my program, I had always been tied down to something “serious” (I say this a bit facetiously). Freshman year I was an athlete, cared a ridiculous amount about maintaining grades, and pledged a fraternity. Every moment of my day was measured out in increments: class from then to then, practice from here to there, pledging from there to eternity. I hardly got out to dink on Thirsty Thursdays. Sophomore year I partied more, but I had a serious girlfriend. When you’re anchored to a woman, a position of ‘responsibility’ in your fraternity and your grades, there’s still a semblance of structure—maybe showing up at class, meeting the girlfriend for dinner and hangout time, going to cocktail, bed, wake-up, shower, repeat. It went like this for five semesters. But sometime in February of my semester abroad, when my girlfriend called me to tell me it was over, I started living what I thought was a Kerouacian fantasy—that of total freedom to drift, listen to new tunes, read great books, avoid schoolwork, and drink too often.

The day after that break-up, I really drowned my sorrows. Getting dumped is always harsh, at least for a couple of weeks. The next afternoon, I trucked up to the convenience store just off campus, bought like two six-packs, and sat in my room imbibing, listening to the Allman Brothers and reading On the Road. I used this break-up as an excuse for acting ridiculously for awhile. Then I got over that relationship, and consciously embraced this feeling of “freedom.” I think everyone was on the same boat here, especially the guys I hung out with. We scheduled a trip to Austria at the last minute. We’d go out five nights a week because we had late classes; they were huge lectures, so showing up was all on the honor system. Because of this, we’d never do the reading for class until it was absolutely necessary (e.g. during finals week). In this position, you no longer feel as though you’ll need an excuse, like a break-up or a family death or a two week long siesta, to act this way. You spend your free time however you feel like it, whether that means packing up and leaving for a five-day weekend or getting trashed on a Sunday night.

But clearly St. Patrick’s Day was a good excuse for going out to get nice and rowdy. We cleared out of our favorite pub, stared at the cold, dark sky, and flipped the collars on our coats up to ours earlobes.

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H.R.: Stands for "Hell Reincarnated"

“God, what a mess, on the ladder of success/Where you take one step and miss the whole first rung/Dreams unfulfilled, graduate unskilled/It beats pickin’ cotton and waitin’ to be forgotten...” –The Replacements, “Bastards of Young”

I really dug that movie Adventureland, the one where Kristen Stewart was not only amazingly attractive but also intelligent, unlike her Twilight character. In the flick, Jesse Eisenberg plays a college-grad who, when his parents suffer a financial setback, must spend his summer after college graduation working in a shitbag amusement park. I’m not sure if that beats sitting on the couch, but whatever, you could write an entire essay on the topic. When the movie started with “Bastards of Young,” I knew I would love it. Then I started living it—that “graduate unskilled” part really hits close to home. You’ll sit around and feel pretty goddamn forgotten.

As I was telling you several posts back, I vowed to myself never to go back to looking (read: begging) for a job like the one for that god-awful insurance racket. Of course, those were my days of idealism, when I had only watched Season Two of Mad Men two times instead of seven. As I laid on my couch fantasizing about being Don Draper a couple of months ago, I realized I was really starting to lose my shit. All of a sudden, my former pledge to myself became a lie, my mom started ‘coaxing’ (read: pretty much begging) me to find a job, and I started looking for meaningless employment once again.

Over the next couple of days, like some kind of hungry hungry hippo, I started applying to jobs left and right: marketing jobs, editorial jobs, internships, things that sounded like they might be remotely related to the basic ability to read and write. Obviously, I was sitting around everyday waiting for an e-mail or a telephone call in response, which was pretty obtuse considering I’m an out-of-work college grad with minimal real world skills. At this point, I wasn’t even angry, but just so completely bored from drafting cover letter after cover letter that I was fantasizing about jumping out of my bedroom window to check if I still had vital signs.

Then I got what I thought were a couple of big breaks.

Earlier in the summer, my friend offered to put in a word for me at her company, some HR mammoth 20 miles from my house. I did my usual elitist thing and told her I didn’t get a 3.7 at a private college so I could go slum it with 23-year olds with three kids and alleged meth addicts. It was a dick move, I know. Of course, a couple months later, when I was curled up in a blanket on the couch watching whatever bad reality show would have me as a viewer, I decided I’d give the job another shot. I called her, sent her my resume, and bam, I had a phone interview set up in like fifteen seconds.

Now, Albert Einstein once wrote the hardest thing in the world to understand was the income tax. For me, the hardest thing in the world to understand is the fucking personality tests companies give you—as you’ll remember from this, I’m not the biggest fan. I hadn’t really known that these buggers existed until a few months earlier, and even when I applied to a more challenging job during senior year, they at least had the decency to make you submit two writing samples before they deep-sixed your application.

This personality test put the one at that insurance company to shame—it was like 250 questions deep, and I was answering it three bourbons deep. After flying through the “I-can-add-and-subtract-and-know-that-smart-and-intelligent-are-synonyms” portion, I was ready to roll. I dove into that fucker like it was the SAT, but that initial energy really didn’t last. They asked me, “If my boss makes what I think is a bad decision, I would challenge him.” Boom—strongly agree. “If I am required to do repetitive tasks everyday, I become bored.” Obviously, strongly agree.

It was the longest, most mind-numbing thing I’ve ever done to get a job that essentially pays you pennies to hassle people day-in and day-out over the telephone. By the time there were three pages left, I was dog tired, panting, and in the middle of another Makers on the rocks. My earlier energy had all but dried up. Then I saw some of the same questions on page eight that I could have sworn were on the first page of this thing. By now, I figured they were going to start asking really unrelated things like “Crest is the only brand of toothpaste I will ever use” and “My predisposition to fits of swearing and punching makes me a difficult person to work with”, and I’d be so out of it, I’d start agreeing.

The personality test is part of a game that I really didn’t know how to play. From my online research, I deduced that many larger companies use these to weed out potentially unfit candidates. In a bad economy, I guess the test makes things much easier for the employer when they have to deal with 679 people applying to the same dogshit job. Essentially, after you take one of these, the personality test software (such a thing does exist) reduces the applicant to a “green,” “yellow,” or “red” candidate where only “green” people are offered interviews.

What’s more, clues about answering these personality tests are, in many cases, online for everyone’s viewing. (In some cases, you can find an actual answer key for the tests online.) There are a host of websites devoted to telling potential applicants how to answer if they want the job in question. And for the gig I tried to get, essentially a glorified customer service position (“marketing” my left nut—you spend all day cold-calling potential clients), you can find websites that’ll tell you exactly how to answer every single question. So, when they asked about challenging your boss if you thought he/she made a poor or unfair decision, you’re supposed to answer “disagree.” In a position like this, giving your boss shit is akin to fucking his wife. You’re expected to put your head down and deal with whatever comes your way. You can’t assume that assertiveness is good for all positions.

But even if this system “works” by allegedly saving corporations menial amounts of capital each year, I’ve read horror stories about personality profiling. On several message boards, you can read about experienced and struggling workers who’ve been out of work for nearly two years. One woman who was applying to several jobs, a couple below her pay grade, said she couldn’t get past the personality test stage for any of the positions she applied to. Even if she looked at a job description and knew she would do well at it, she couldn’t move forward because the “sacred” personality profile killed her chances.

In essence, the potential employee’s reduced to a type, and there’s not much he/she can do to move beyond it. You can’t get an interview if you show up in the “yellow” column unless there’s a major employee shortage which, in this economy, is as prevalent as a dinosaur egg. Moreover, for monstrous corporations who pass out huge salaries and bonuses each year, the amount of “money saved” by using these types of tests is meaningless. Regardless of whether they use personality tests or not, these companies will continue to successfully function from here to eternity.

My thoughts: these tests are a waste, as useless as SAT scores are to predicting someone’s future success. People who faced an unfortunate series of events in a bad economy are passed over continually, and those who are apparently web-savvy can easily bullshit their way into a job they’re not always qualified for. In sum, it’s possible to beat the system if you’re dishonest.

And that’s all I’m gonna say about that.

I made it out of this test unscathed, hoping I hadn’t totally blown it. I get a call from the recruiter the next day, all professional, “Good afternoon, how are you today? This is blah blah blah from blah blah blah and I was wondering if you still had that few minutes to talk.” So far, so good. We get through all the crap, and he says, “Okay, now did you have any trouble taking that personality test?” I was about to tell the truth, but I just said no. Then he pulls up the results, and does sort of a half-cough followed by a few moments of silence. Then that thorny bastard lied to me and said, “Well, gee, we don’t have your results yet, and without those, we can’t move forward.” I couldn’t believe they were resorting to this bureaucratic-speak like I was applying for a new driver’s license and forgot to bring the page with my social security number along. Infuriating. He then tells me that, “Well, I’ll get those results hopefully soon, and then I’ll try to reach out to you later in the week. Okay, goodbye now.”

He must have the shortest fucking arms in the entire world. I never heard another word. I called and e-mailed to follow-up, but the only things in my inbox were messages telling me how I could make my dick longer. It’s frighteningly hilarious. It’s remarkable that, from a company pulling in a ton of its earnings by annoying people on the phone, I couldn’t even get someone to call me back with a straight answer.

I quickly closed that very short chapter of my life, resigned to the fact that doing well at a good higher-ed institution is not conducive to getting a job that you don’t need a degree for. Then, I took a long walk in the cold, laid out in some forest somewhere and waited to die.

A fortnight passed. After I started to get my shit together again (somehow still alive), and my mom and I deconstructed the multitude of reasons for that bizarre response from this clown, I had another break for a job, a marketing position that was probably a little out of my league, and that half of my state’s population must’ve applied for. One of my friends helped get my resume over to the marketing manager at this company, and I thought, “YES! At least those two-bit gatekeepers won’t get their grubby hands on it.”

Wrong.

The next day, I was awoken from a peaceful slumber at 10:00 AM (laugh all you want) by some chirpy woman, and I heard the dreaded words: “This is a recruiter from...”. A lump crawled up in my throat. We start talking about my current job (unemployment, occasional freelance writing) and then she asks me a couple of the standard interview questions, “So name a challenge for me, and tell me how you overcame it.” Greatest question ever—I lay down a solid, short response.

In all fairness, I shouldn’t have expected anything from this exchange because the job was just a bit out of my league, and these people’d been interviewing for the same position for over a month.* But of course, the HR fuckers couldn’t just say no, I’m sorry, you’re not qualified—they instead told me, “Well, you have to take a personality test for this job” (immediately I’m grimacing) “and we’ll send it out to you later in the day.” Later in the day, the next day, and the next week, my inbox was empty like the plains of Nebraska.

Seeing as I’m not the hugest fan of personality tests, you can see why that could be interpreted as a blessing in disguise.

Yet, what really bugs me about the people I spoke to was their refusal to be straight with me. I wasn’t raised to be dishonest, and if I doing the job of one of these schmos, my response to an unqualified candidate would just be “better luck next time, kiddo.” I mean, sure, some guys my dad’s age (whose opinions I really don’t respect) are telling me that “This is the way it works now, so you better get on board. You gotta learn to take personality tests and deal with constant rejection. If you work hard, you’ll succeed.” What a load of horse puckey. Do people really believe this Ayn Rand crap in an economy where the middle class is making less than they were in 1978 (inflation’s accounted for)?**

You can deal with not hearing anything when you just submit an application. It’s a pain to wait for a response you know is never coming, but you live with it. But you don’t tell someone they’ll have a phone interview and then, because of some made-up complications (e.g. your personality test “doesn’t check out”), not even bother to reschedule it and ignore further follow-up calls. You don’t say you’re going to e-mail a person something later in the day and then just say “fuck you, have fun.” These idiots behave like a bunch of pussy elementary school kids. They were the ones who used to run away from the kid they didn’t like on the playground instead of telling him/her to eat shit and go away.

Really, I’m not sure if this is a personal attack on these people, or on the companies that employ these spineless shrews. But I contend that it would’ve been more mature for them to simply say, “Look, you don’t have the qualifications for the job” or “Your personality doesn’t match what we look for in a candidate” instead of hanging up the phone. I don’t mind following up or chasing someone to get a job. But I do mind that when a company offers an interview and then reneges on it without any explanation. A little bit of decency, while at first distressing, eventually goes a long way.

Again, this was a learning experience. I will never apply to a job of this sort again. Sure you graduated unskilled, but you’re learning all the same, albeit from the corner of your basement couch watching Leave it to Beaver. At this juncture, I think that repeating the same routine over and over and over and over and over again amounts to this: if insanity is defined as doing something over and over again (e.g. applying to a ton of jobs you are certainly qualified for) and expecting different results (e.g. someone actually calling you back), I must be stone-cold fucking nuts. You really can’t repeat that process forever.

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*Two weeks later, the person who probably would’ve been my immediate supervisor quit. They still haven’t filled his position yet. The lucky bastard who got the job I applied for must be having a hell of a time trying to learn the ropes.

**Aside: If the wall between employer, or really the ‘gatekeepers’ at these companies, and potential employee is so vast, I don’t think we can claim to be a society that prides itself on creativity, originality, and ambition. If personality tests and one-page resumes define us wholly, and we allow them to define us just to “get that first job,” then we are living in some unbelievably sad times. You gotta take Don Draper’s advice here: move forward. Find a workable plan B and run with it.

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My Ten Favorite Films of the Decade (Part 3)

I'll pull a Roger Ebert. I’ve picked my favorite ten films of the decade, but I can easily choose another ten great ones here, in no particular order. They are all well worth viewing if you’ve time to kill.

In the Bedroom (2001): an intense drama concerning how the tragedy of a murdered son can break apart a seemingly strong, upper-class family Set in rural New England, Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek, as the well-off parents, give two of the strongest performances of the last ten years. This one comes just a hair short of my top ten.

The Hurt Locker (2009): my pick for the best film of 2009. I knew it was a great movie about ten minutes in—it captures the absolute intensity of Operation Iraqi Freedom in a way that every other film since 2003 has failed to. Jeremy Renner gives one of the best performances of the year as a soldier who thrives on the life-or-death challenges of disarming bombs in Baghdad, all while consistently antagonizing the soldiers on missions with him.

Wonder Boys (2001): easily one of the most observant and sarcastic movies I’ve watched about the writing process. Michael Douglas plays a washed-up, marijuana-dependent novelist/literature professor who hasn’t authored a thing in nearly a decade. Tobey Maguire gives a very mature performance as the kid who threatens to surpass his mentor.

Stranger Than Fiction (2006): Will Ferrell turns in a great performance, working outside the now-boring confines of his “Frank-the-Tank” personality. He plays an IRS agent who starts hearing voices, only to find out that the voice is that of a real-life author. The kicker: she’s writing a book where he’ll be killed off in the final pages. Maggie Gyllenhall, Emma Thompson, and Dustin Hoffman are all phenomenal supporting players.

Y Tu Mama Tambien (2001): the story of two sex-crazed best friends from different economic backgrounds who, almost accidentally, set off on a road trip with a woman twice their age to discover themselves. The final scenes reveal a couple of interesting plot twists that change both characters’ lives in ways they couldn’t have imagined at the outset. And, for once, the voiceover actually is actually useful for putting the story in a broader context.

American Beauty (2000): Kevin Spacey gives a wonderful performance as Lester Burnham, the father of a family that’s falling to pieces. To make things better, he tries to relive his youth by quitting his white-collar job, flipping burgers, lifting weights, and getting high as fuck all the time, much to the chagrin of his wife and only daughter. And Chris Cooper, as the homophobic neighbor with a major secret to hide, steals most of the scenes he’s in.

Starting Out in the Evening (2007): another great movie about writing. Leonard Schiller (Frank Langella, always outstanding) is an ailing author who wrote four books earlier in his life that are now out of print. A grad student played by Lauren Ambrose becomes very close to Schiller and tries to use her master’s thesis to bring the author’s work back from the dead.

Mystic River (2003): a phenomenal detective story about three childhood friends who are uneasily reunited after a gruesome murder. The performances from Kevin Bacon, Tim Robbins and especially Sean Penn make this a must-see for any movie buff. This is one of Eastwood’s best films--and it packs a huge punch in last 20 minutes.

The Squid and the Whale (2005): Noah Baumbach proved to be a whiz at writing smart, cutting dialogue with this film. After watching his 1995 comedy Kicking and Screaming, I checked out this pic, a study of a family in complete crisis. With the dissolution of a marriage between Bernard and Joan Berkman (Jeff Daniels, Laura Linney, both excellent), their two kids must take sides in a brutal divorce.

Before Sunset (2004): this talky romantic film is the sequel to Richard Linklater’s impressive 1995 pic, Before Sunrise. This time, the camera follows Jesse and Celine (Ethan Hawke, Julie Delpy) through Paris as they talk intelligently about how their lives have changed in the ten years they were apart. But their reunion finds both dissatisfied with their lives to a degree. It’s a brilliantly written and well-acted film, even if it’s not quite as lighthearted as the earlier picture.

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