And that was the last thing I remembered.
The next day, at five P.M., I woke up in abunk bed in our hostel. Ryan was sleeping facedown on the floor in just his underwear, the rest of his clothes balled up beneath his head like a pillow. Eloisa and Anetta were spooning each other in bed across the room. Ryan rolled over and looked at me.
“I think I blacked out,” I said with a hoarse voice.
“Do you remember going out into the middle of the dance floor and challenging people to dance battles?” he asked, rubbing his eyes slowly.
“No. How did I do?”
“Mostly people just yelled at you. Then you stole a knife from the bartender and cut your sleeves off. Then the bartender asked for it back and you started making body builder poses and then ran away. So that was pretty awesome.”
I smiled in victory and then realized I felt worse than I’d ever felt in my life. I sat up—a little too quickly, I guess, because I immediately projectile-vomited into an empty bag of chips. I went to wipe my mouth on my missing shirtsleeves, and ended up rubbing my puke onto my bare biceps.
“What do we do now?” I asked Ryan between sips of a water bottle I found next to me.
Ryan handed me a rolled-up piece of toilet paper, then took a moment to recover from the effort. Between deep breaths, he said, “We do it again.”
And we did. The next night was almost identical. The only differences were, the club we went to was called Amnesia, which threw a “Purple Party” instead of a white one; my fake name was Peter Schlesinger and I sold yachts; I made out with a strange woman who asked me for cocaine instead of ecstasy; and I woke up the next morning feeling even worse than I had the morning before. Also, my underwear was on over my pants.
With two full nights in Ibiza under our belts, the four of us checked out of our hostel and boarded a boat back to Barcelona. I felt a sense of accomplishment. I had gone to Europe in hopes of becoming someone I was never able to be back home, and I was sure that, if I could be more like the guy I’d been for the past two days, my life would be infinitely better. I also felt really bloated. My stomach was hard to the touch; it looked like I was in my second trimester. I was exhausted, so I went inside the main cabin of the ship and plopped myself down in one of the couple hundred seats, shut my eyes, and fell asleep.
About four hours later my eyes shot open. It felt like I’d swallowed a rat that was now trying to claw its way up through my intestines to freedom. I tried to go back to sleep but couldn’t; instead I ended up just sitting awake, slumped over in my chair, until we finally arrived at Barcelona nine hours later, just as the sun came up. When I tried explaining my agony to Ryan, who is not a “believer” in traditional medicine, he offered a theory of his own: “I bet you it’s because of the frequencies in this ocean. Your cells probably aren’t used to these frequencies.”
“I don’t think that’s it,” I replied, weakly.
I tried ignoring the pain, and I made it to the train station, where we boarded our train for Madrid. By the time we reached our hostel there a few hours later, though, I could barely stand up. The room we got for the night was windowless and felt at least fifteen degrees hotter than the temperature outside, which was well over a hundred. I collapsed on the bed closest to the door and curled into the fetal position in hopes I’d feel better, but as I moved my legs toward my chin I felt a stabbing pain shoot through my stomach and up into my chest.
“Ry, I need to go to the emergency room,” I moaned.
“I think you’re gonna be okay. You’re away from the ocean now and its weird frequencies,” he replied.
“Ry. I need to go to the emergency room right now, man.”
Ryan nodded and gingerly lifted me out of bed. I slung one arm around him as he helped me downstairs and out onto the street, where we hailed a cab. About ten minutes later I was sitting in the waiting area of an emergency room when a nurse approached us and said something in Spanish that neither Ryan or I could understand.
“What is hurt?” she finally sputtered in broken English.
“I think the frequencies of the ocean have messed with his cells,” Ryan said.
“My stomach hurts,” I said.
“Point where,” she said.
I gestured toward my entire stomach area and she nodded. Five minutes later she led me to a private room, where she started an IV in my left arm. Twenty minutes later I was standing in front of an X-ray machine.
The X-ray technician rattled off some directions in Spanish and I figured out from the key words that he wanted me to take off my clothes. Then I realized from the look on his face that at no point had he asked me to take off my underwear. I pulled them back up as quickly as I could, which in my pathetic condition wasn’t very quickly at all. After he snapped a couple X-rays, I waited with Ryan until the nurse brought us into a small office where the doctor, a young woman in scrubs and a white lab coat, sat behind a desk, a set of X-rays spread out in front of her.
“No hables espanol, si?” she said.
“Not really,” I said.
“Okay. I try explain in English,” she replied as she held up an X-ray in front of us.
“Your stomach is very mad. It do not work. Here,” she said, pointing to two dark areas under my ribcage. “This is, ah . . .” she added, then turned to the nurse and rattled off a question in Spanish.
The nurse picked it up where the doctor had left off. “Ah, I know this is not most correct but for understand—too much poo poo and fart,” she said, pointing at the dark spots on the X-ray.
“That was the most awesome diagnosis I’ve ever heard in my life,” Ryan said.
“Thank you,” the nurse said without a hint of humor.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“You got too many poo poos and farts in your stomach, dude. That’s pretty clear,” Ryan said, laughing.
“Have you eat drugs?” the doctor asked.
“No. Not at all.”
“Alcohol?”
“Yes. A lot.”
“We went to Ibiza,” Ryan interjected.
The nurse and the doctor exchanged brief but satisfied smirks, as if they’d been placing bets on Ibiza.
“Okay, Justin,” the doctor continued. “Some people, they are very good at alcohol, and they go to many discos, and it is okay. Some people, they are very bad at alcohol, and it is not good for them discos, and they are good at sitting. You are good at sit down.”
She went on to tell me that, because of the drastic change in my lifestyle over the past forty-eight hours, my stomach had reacted violently and basically stopped working. Constipation and a buildup of gas were causing all the pain. She said I wouldn’t really be able to walk around for the next few days, then handed me a prescription to alleviate the blockage and pain. I thanked her profusely and we left the emergency room and hobbled next door to the pharmacy.
As I rifled around in my wallet, preparing to pay the bill, I noticed my prepaid calling card and remembered that I owed my parents a call. After settling up, Ryan and I took a cab back to our hostel room where, exhausted, I sat down and dialed my parents’ number. The phone picked up after one ring.
“It’s four thirty in the fucking morning,” my dad said.
“Oh, sorry, I forgot.”
“Well who in the hell is this?”
“It’s Justin, Dad.”
“Justin? You sound like shit run over, son.”
“Yeah, I’m not feeling well.”
“Not feeling well how?” he said, his voice quickening with concern.
“Okay, well, don’t tell Mom because she’ll freak out, and I’m gonna be fine, but I just had to go to the emergency room.”
“Aw, hell. For what?”
I explained everything I’d done in the past couple days: Ibiza, the minibottles of booze, the stomach pains, the X-rays, right down to the prescription I’d just been given. He listened quietly until I was finished.
“Can I make a suggestion?” he asked.
> “Sure.”
“Maybe next time you’re thinking about getting shithouse drunk all night, you don’t.”
“Dad, I barely ever drink.”
“Yeah, that’s my point. You can’t hold your liquor for shit. So maybe drinking a whole bunch of it and shaking your ass ain’t your thing.”
“We were just having a good time and trying to meet people, you know?”
“Well, you don’t need to get shithoused and go to Europe to do that. You’re over six feet tall and your mom says you’re funny. I’d say run with those two things and see where it gets you.”
We said good-bye just as my calling card was about to run out of minutes. Then I sat down on my bed, and, for what felt like the first time in days, I fell asleep.
A week later, Ryan and I were in Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris, waiting to board our flight back home. My stomach was feeling infinitely better, although I was still relatively weak and couldn’t walk more than a few blocks without having to sit down. We had an hour before our flight took off, so I decided to check my e-mail at an Internet kiosk in the terminal. At the top of my inbox was an e-mail from Vietnam Joe:
Justin, I hope you have a great trip. I am using Vietnamese to English translation, so I apologize if there is incorrect grammar. I had a great time and met many very attractive women. I am on a good streak that I want to say that meeting you and Ryan and I think you are very great man. You must know a lot of attractive women. I hope to go out with you all one day when I came to the United States. I want to meet the women you know. I will not steal from you. Oh no I can not promise!
Joe
A Man Takes His Shots and Then He Scrubs the Shit out of Some Dishes
Between the ages of sixteen and nineteen, each of my friends lost his virginity. One by one they fell, until finally, at the age of twenty, my friend Jeff and I were the only virgins left. I was in my second year of college and lived in a run-down five-bedroom house in Pacific Beach, San Diego, with Jeff and three other close friends. The morning after a party we threw celebrating the end of the first semester, I stumbled out of my bedroom and found my roommates hanging out in the grease-stained kitchen.
“Any milk left?” I asked, hoping to drown my hangover with Cinnamon Toast Crunch.
“Jeff had sex last night,” my friend Dan said.
I froze.
Maybe he’s joking, I thought. I looked at Jeff, who was standing in the corner of the room sipping a Gatorade with the swagger of someone who had won seven Super Bowls, and knew it was no joke.
“Jeff had sex? Jeff?” I said, in disbelief.
“Well, fuck you too, dude,” Jeff replied.
“Sorry, I’m just surprised. I’m happy for you,” I said.
I was not happy for him. Imagine if you and a friend were stranded on a desert island for the last five years. Then one day you wake up and saw your friend on a raft in the ocean, paddling toward a rescue ship. Then, as you scream, “Come back! Don’t leave me!,” your friend laughs and waves at you, then keeps paddling, without even looking back. That is exactly how I felt in that moment. It didn’t seem that terrible to be a virgin when I wasn’t the only one. Now I was the only member left in the club, and it was awful.
I never felt pressure from my friends to have sex. Nobody was getting laid that regularly, and even Dan, who probably had more sex than any of my other friends, rarely talked about it, for a reason he put rather eloquently: “I play tennis every once in a while, but I don’t brag about it because I suck at it.” But now that Jeff had had sex, I couldn’t help but feel like they had stepped into manhood and I was on the outside looking in.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t been trying. It’s not like I had some special being-awesome-with-the-ladies gear that I just hadn’t chosen to shift into. I’d always been terrified of talking to women and usually just avoided it. When I headed to college, I tried to relax and not obsess over having sex, hoping it would just happen.
It didn’t.
A couple months later, I finished my second year at San Diego State. During my sophomore year, I had played on the baseball team and spent fifty-plus hours a week practicing, playing, attending classes, and studying. That didn’t leave much time for a job, so when summer rolled around, I had to make all the money I’d need for the year. On the first day of summer break, Dan and I drove around in his Mazda putting in applications at every restaurant, retail store, and hotel we could find. As we drove home from the last hotel just before sunset, we stopped at a stoplight near the beach. Directly in front of us, hanging from a blank storefront in a strip mall, was a giant banner:
GRAND OPENING
HOOTERS
NOW HIRING
“That’d be funny, if we applied to a Hooters,” Dan said as the light turned green.
We drove along quietly for a few moments.
“We should apply there,” I said.
“Yeah, that’s a good idea,” Dan said, suddenly turning the wheel hard and making a screeching U-turn in the middle of the street.
We parked out in front of the banner and went inside. The restaurant was still being built, so the inside was filled with construction workers and raw materials. In the corner were two men sitting at a desk: a big Korean man in his twenties, and a five-foot-tall, grizzled white guy in his midforties wearing a Hooters T-shirt and hat. He looked like the kind of guy who, if he hadn’t killed a man himself, at least must have buried a body somewhere along the way. We approached them tentatively.
“Hi, are you guys taking applications?” I said.
“No. We just like to put a big-ass sign out front for shits and giggles and then sit around and talk to every dipshit that walks in here,” the little man said in a raspy voice that suggested he’d been smoking since birth.
Dan and I stood silently for a moment, unsure if we were supposed to laugh.
“I’m busting your balls. Here’s an application. I assume you’re applying to be a cook. I’m Bob. This is Song Su,” he added, pointing to his colleague.
Dan and I introduced ourselves, filled out the applications, and left.
For the next few days we continued to hunt for jobs, but later that week I got a call from Song Su.
“You guys got the job. Tell your tall friend that’s pretty like a girl so I don’t have to make two calls. Orientation is Monday,” he said.
“That’s awesome! Thank you!” I said.
“Don’t get excited. The job sucks and you make minimum wage. I think. I can’t remember. Whatever it is, it’s terrible pay. See you Monday,” he replied.
I didn’t care how terrible the pay was going to be. I was going to be surrounded by women eight hours a day, five days a week. For the entire summer. I would literally be forced to talk to them. Maybe, just maybe, I was going to have sex.
A couple days later, I sat alongside Dan and eight other guys in two rows of chairs in a room at the back of the recently finished Hooters, covered in fake street signs and orange, as Song Su and Bob stood before us. Bob wore a mesh tank top and sported a mustache that would make any 1970s baseball player proud. He slowly puffed at a cigarette as he addressed the male members of his newly assembled staff.
“I know what you’re all thinking. You’re going to get some stank on your dick with one of these waitresses, that’s why you took the job.”
“ ’Cause the job sucks,” Song Su added.
“Yep. Job sucks,” Bob nodded.
“Well, let me be the first to tell you,” Bob continued. “That’s probably going to happen. You’re probably gonna nail one of them. I nailed one. Then I married her,” he said.
“Whoa, no way,” said a guy in the front row.
“Yes way, shithead. I took one down. Married her. She had my babies, the whole deal. Anyway, just do your work and don’t piss me off, and you’ll have a good time,” Bob said, before spitting on the ground.
After his speech, he gave us a tour of the kitchen and the walk-in freezer, which he said was “an awesome place t
o get a hand job if you’re not in the middle of a dinner rush.” He finished up the tour by handing us black T-shirts with the Hooters logo emblazoned on the front. Then he welcomed us to the Hooters family, which transitioned into a bizarre tangent about his time in the military, where he warned us about “the kind of scum that fuck a man’s wife when he’s overseas in the shit.”
As we drove out of the parking lot an hour and a half later, Dan made a comment that was hard to ignore: “Dude. I don’t want to put any extra pressure on you, ’cause I know you’re all weird about this virginity shit. But if that Bob guy can have sex with a Hooters girl, you have to be able to.”
I agreed. I could barely contain my excitement. Sex had seemed so elusive, but now I felt like I was mere days away.
Two days later, Dan and I walked into Hooters for our first shift wearing our tan aprons and Hooters hats. We realized two things really quickly: 1) Song Su wasn’t lying: the job definitely sucked; 2) the majority of the girls working there had major emotional problems. And not cries-too-much emotional problems; more like stabs-her-boyfriend-with-a-steak-knife-then-falls-into-a-corner-and-starts-whispering-to-herself emotional problems. Even if I knew how to talk to women like that, or wanted to—neither of which I did—the work day was so jam-packed with cleaning, scrubbing, wing-battering, and Dumpster-emptying that I didn’t even have a chance.
One day I was washing dishes in the back when Bob poked his head in. “Skippy,” he said. (Bob never remembered anyone’s name. Nor did he bother to cover up this fact.) “Skippy, today is not your day. I’m going to tell you a story. Guy walks into a Hooters, gets drunk, pukes his fucking guts out up on the balcony. You clean it up, and afterward I buy you a beer and tell you you’re a swell guy. The end. What do you think?”
“I hate that story, Bob,” I said.
“Maybe it was in the telling,” he said, handing me a mop and a bucket in tow. Even though the balcony stood fifty feet from the ocean, the stench of vomit overpowered the smell of the sea. I had found the mess and started scrubbing when I heard a woman’s voice.