“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.
“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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