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.