More Sh*t My Dad Says

You Are Good at Sit Down

In the fall of 1998 I began my freshman year at San Diego State University, which my dad commonly referred to as “Harvard, without all the smart people.” Even though the campus was only eight miles from my parents’ house and about a fifth of my high school graduating class was also heading to SDSU, I felt like it would be a new adventure and I was excited to begin.

“I’m pretty sure no one knew who I was in high school,” I said to my best friend Dan, who was also going on to SDSU, as we drove to freshman orientation a few weeks before classes started.

“I dunno. I think people knew who you were,” Dan said as he merged onto the 8 freeway. “I was telling this guy on my volleyball team that we were both going to State and he was like, ‘Isn’t he that guy who wears sweatpants to school sometimes?’”

“Ideally I’d like to be known as something other than that.”

“Who gives a shit about high school? We’re going to be in college now. Nobody knows us here. Girls want to party with crazy dudes. You could be the crazy party guy. Or I could be, and you could be that guy’s friend.”

The idea that I could entirely change all the things I didn’t like about myself and wipe my slate clean was enticing. Unfortunately, I was going to have to try to do so while living at home, because, despite working all summer, I had less than five hundred dollars to my name when the fall rolled around.

My mom understood my plight and tried her best to offer up a solution.

“If you want to make love to a woman in the house, I promise we won’t bother you,” she said one night during dinner when I was a couple weeks into my first semester.

“Let me add an addendum to that. You find a woman that’ll screw you with your mom next door, you run the fuck the other way,” my dad said.

Despite my hopes of reinventing myself as a fearless social animal, I spent the first year of college the same way I had spent high school—hanging out with my high school friends and meeting practically no one new. When it came to partying, San Diego State seemed like the major leagues: it was as if every high school had sent its craziest party animals to compete in a tournament. When I did make it to a party, I usually found myself standing to the side, moving only when some incredibly drunk person stumbled toward me and said something like, “I’m gonna pee here. Could you stand in front of me?” Whenever I was given the chance to melt into the walls, I did.

My friend Ryan, who also attended San Diego State, was similarly frustrated with his freshman year experience, so I was not entirely surprised when, midway through our second semester, he suggested that the two of us get out of Dodge for the summer. Ryan suggested we should take the money we had saved from our job cleaning boats all year and backpack through Europe.

“Everyone I know who’s gone over there has partied with girls and had a bunch of sex,” Ryan said as we drove home from class one day.

“How many people do you know that’ve gone over there?” I asked.

“Hmm. I guess I only know one guy. But that’s what he said.”

That was good enough for me. And I could think of no better travel companion than Ryan, whom I’d been friends with since I was five years old. He was a grade above me, so it wasn’t until I started college, and found myself in a lot of classes with him, that we became really close. Lean and sinewy, with a mop of so-blonde-it’s-white hair on top of his head, Ryan looks like a cross between a mad scientist and the winner of a surfing competition. He is easily the most positive human being I’ve ever met but also one of the strangest, as evidenced by the time he sat me down in high school and informed me, “There’s a fifty-fifty chance the moon is actually an alien spaceship that’s observing us.” But he could be convincing—at least when it came to more earthly pleasures—and together we booked plane tickets for Europe, leaving in July and returning in early August, along with an unlimited EuroRail pass.

The night before we left, I excitedly stuffed my suitcase with as many pairs of underwear and condoms as possible. I was still a virgin, but I was pretty sure Europe would put an end to that. I hadn’t been to another country since I was three years old, and I’d spent the whole second semester of my freshman year waiting for this trip. It was going to be the first real adventure of my life, although I stopped referring to it as an “adventure” after my brother told me that was “the pussiest thing I’ve ever heard someone say.” Regardless, I could barely contain my enthusiasm when my parents came into my bedroom as I was cramming a toothbrush into the tiny front pouch of my oversized Jansport backpack.

“All right, real quick, couple things,” my dad said, sitting down on my desk chair. “You know how I get pissed off when we’re driving around San Diego and some asshole in a rental car doesn’t know where the hell he’s going?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“Well, over there, you’re the asshole in the rental. Be respectful of people and their culture, okay? I don’t want to pull you out of a secret prison because you pissed on some sacred monument when you were drunk.”

“I’ll have Ryan with me,” I said.

“That guy’s a minor head injury away from eating his own shit. Not much of a case you’re making.”

“Call us every couple of weeks to let us know you’re okay,” my mom said.

“I don’t know if there’s always going to be a phone around.”

“You’re not leading a fucking expedition to Antarctica. Find a phone. Call,” my dad insisted.

The next day Ryan and I flew from San Diego to London, via New York. After eighteen hours of traveling, just after sunrise, we dropped our packs in our crammed room in a dingy hostel near Trafalgar Square. We grabbed breakfast at a nearby pub, where Ryan studied his copy of Let’s Go Europe like he was going to have to recite it for his Bar Mitzvah.

“Ibiza!” he said, looking up from the book like he’d uncovered a clue in a murder case.

“What’s that?” I asked in between forkfuls of overcooked eggs.

“It’s an island near Spain where I guess people just party twenty-four hours a day,” he explained, as he scanned the book. “Whoa. It says there’s a club on the island where two people just have sex in the middle of the dance floor the whole night,” he added, continuing to read.

The whole reason I had come to Europe was to go to places like Ibiza, places where letting loose and getting crazy were my only option and I would be forced into the ring. I was in.

The next few days we toured London, seeing Buckingham Palace, the Tower Bridge, and finally getting into a heated argument with a Londoner after Ryan suggested that Big Ben should be called Medium Sized Ben, because “it’s not even that big.” After packing in as much sightseeing as we could, we took the Chunnel from London to Paris, where we spent a couple days rushing through museums and eating anything that had butter on it, and from Paris we headed to Switzerland for several days and then Florence.

When we arrived in Florence, it was a hundred and ten degrees. We checked into our hostel, which consisted of two large rooms packed with twenty bunk beds each, and two bathrooms total. Ryan and I walked through the narrow passageway between the beds, all the way to the back of the room, where the top bunks of two beds were open. On the bottom of Ryan’s bunk lay a very thin Vietnamese man in his early twenties. Despite the oppressive heat, he was wearing a denim jacket, denim jeans, a blue T-shirt with Michael Jordan’s face on it, and a pair of matching blue Chuck Taylor Converse shoes. Beads of sweat covered his forehead, dripping down his face as he lay there. Ryan reached his hand out and introduced himself.

“Hey, I’m Ry.”

“Vietnam Joe,” the man said, in a thick accent.

“Aren’t you kinda hot in all that stuff, Joe?” Ryan asked.

“Large hot,” Joe said, grabbing a tissue out of his jacket pocket and wiping his forehead.

“If you’re worried about your jacket getting stolen, I have a lock on my bag—you can put it in there and it’ll be fine,” I said.

Joe had no reaction, so I pointed at his jacket, then at my bag and my lock.

“No,” Joe said.

“I like Joe’s style. Fuck it, it’s hot, but he likes how he looks in his jacket. I understand that,” Ryan said.

When we left the hostel a few minutes later to go to dinner, Joe walked out with us. He proceeded to follow us, two steps behind, all the way to a nearby restaurant whose menu we couldn’t decipher but whose prices looked affordable.

“Do you want to have dinner with us, Joe?” I asked.

“Yes.”

The three of us sat down at a table in the restaurant’s air-conditioned interior, and Ryan and I learned quickly that Joe’s English vocabulary was limited to about fifty words. Food was either “large delicious,” “delicious,” or “not delicious.” Temperatures were either “large hot” or “not hot.” Oddly, there was one full English sentence he could manage: “Second-year guard Ray Allen has a silky-smooth, NBA-ready game.” When Joe saw how entertained we were by this, he showed us the Ray Allen basketball card that he kept in his wallet, which bore this very sentence. Since Ryan and I knew not one word of Vietnamese, we tried to communicate with Joe using the English words he knew, so he wouldn’t feel left out.

After dinner, and over the next couple days, Joe joined me and Ryan as we explored Florence. He was up for any activity, especially if it involved going somewhere near to a leather goods shop. He loved leather, insisted on browsing through any store that sold it, and at one point purchased a pair of burgundy leather shorts, which he later tried on for us at the hostel before pronouncing them “unstoppable” (another word he’d found on the Ray Allen card). Joe was good-natured, a fun guy to have around, and he seemed to have traveled to Europe for the same reasons we had. A couple days after meeting him, the three of us sat down for lunch at a small café near our hostel and Ryan broke down our plan.

“Ibiza,” Ryan said, pointing at a picture of one of the island’s many nightclubs in a Spanish travel guidebook he’d bought that day.

“You, me, Ryan, Ibiza?” I said to Joe.

“Large hot?” Joe said, looking at the picture.

“Everywhere is large hot, Joe. There’s a heat wave in Europe,” Ryan responded.

Joe sat back for a moment thinking as he picked up his glass of ice water and ran it against his forehead.

“Large girls?” Joe asked.

“Oh, dude. Tons of large girls. This is why we’re here, Joe. We’ve waited the whole trip to meet girls in Ibiza and start partying,” Ryan said.

“Hmmmm,” Joe said.

“Joe. You will like Ibiza. Silky-smooth guard Ray Allen and his NBA-ready game would like Ibiza.”

Joe laughed. “Second-year guard Ray Allen has a silky-smooth, NBA-ready game.”

“I think that’s a yes,” Ryan said to me.

The three of us walked to the train station and bought tickets for the following day to Barcelona, where we’d catch the ferry to Ibiza. We must have looked like one of those movies where three animals that would never get along in the wild join forces to find their way back home.

I figured the next couple days were going to be a total blackout, so I decided to give my parents a call that evening. After I chatted with my mom for a few minutes, she put my dad on the line.

“So, how’s it going? You seeing some art and history or you too busy trying to slap your pecker against anything with a wet spot?”

“No, I saw some art. We spent like two hours in the Louvre.”

“Nice. Two thousand years of priceless works of art and you bust through it in two hours. Eat shit, da Vinci,” he said. “Where you heading next?”

“An island called Ibiza,” I said.

“It’s pronounced Ibitha,” he replied.

“You’ve heard of it?”

“I hate to shit on your preconceived notions of me, but I’m pretty goddamn worldly.”

“Well, that’s where we’re going,” I said, looking at my watch to make sure I hadn’t used up too much of my prepaid calling card.

“Feel free to tell me to piss off, but why in the hell are you going to some shit stain in the middle of the ocean?”

“It’s supposed to be one big party, twenty-four hours a day.”

“Sounds like the worst place on earth. Woulda thought you hated shit like that.”

“Well, I don’t,” I said.

“Whatever floats your boat. Well, anyway, have fun and don’t screw a woman if she’s on drugs.”

It’s not often that a sane human being thinks, “I’ll show my dad I can party,” but that phrase reverberated in my head for the next couple hours.

The next day, Ryan, Joe, and I boarded a train to Barcelona. Our train car looked and smelled like it had once been used to transport slaughtered livestock. There was no air-conditioning on board, and each train car was filled with sweaty travelers. By the time we found seats, Joe had already broken into a full body sweat that was threatening to seep through his denim jacket.

Just before the train took off, a group of three girls in their late teens wearing summery dresses and carrying backpacks embroidered with the Mexican flag sat down in the row ahead of us. Joe looked at us, then the girls, then back at us. Then he gave us a thumbs-up.

“It’s a super-long train ride. We should talk to these girls. Try and get them to go to Ibiza with us,” Ry whispered.

“Totally,” I whispered back.

“Maybe we wait until they get up to go to the bathroom or something, then start up a conversation. Ask them what the weirdest house they’ve ever seen is, or something,” Ry said.

“I don’t think that’s a good opener,” I whispered.

“What? Yes it is. It’s not a yes-or-no question. They have to talk about the house and why it’s weird, and that starts a conversation.”

Before we could argue, Joe was tapping the girl in front of him on the shoulder. She turned around.

“Train large hot, yes?” Joe said to her.

“It is really hot. Our whole trip, everywhere has been hot,” the girl said with a thick Spanish accent.

“Vietnam Joe,” he said, sticking his hand out to shake.

“Abelena,” she said, shaking his hand. “Where are you going to?”

“Hey, we’re Joe’s friends. You guys are from Mexico, huh? What’s the weirdest house you’ve ever seen there?” Ryan interrupted.

“We’re going to Ibiza,” I quickly added.

“Fiesta,” Joe said, smiling and nodding his head, causing all the girls to laugh.

“That’s funny,” Abelena said to Joe.

Within twenty minutes the three girls had turned around in their seats and were focusing intensely on Joe, who was showing them detailed pencil drawings of motorcycles he had sketched in a journal.

“For Joe,” he said, pointing at one specific drawing of an aerodynamic-looking motorcycle.

“That is definitely the best one. I can see why you like it,” Abelena said to him.

“Which one is for me?” her friend asked, smiling at Joe like he was a celebrity she had waited in line to meet.

Ryan turned to me in disbelief.

“Dude. I don’t even know what’s going on right now, but it is super awesome,” Ryan said.

By the time we reached Barcelona, not only had Joe invited Abelena to sit next to him, where she now slept with her head on his shoulder, but he had gotten her travel companions warmed up to us. Ryan and I spent most of the ten-hour ride chatting with Eloisa and Anetta, who, we learned, were freshmen in college and lived in Mexico City. The weirdest house they’d ever seen, they told us, was a house in Tijuana that looked like a giant naked woman. At about four in the morning, when almost everyone else on the train was sleeping, I asked Eloisa if she and her friends wanted to come to Ibiza with us. She said yes.

The next morning, my eyes opened just as we were pulling into the Barcelona train station. Ryan, Joe, the three girls, and I grabbed our packs and walked down to the ferry building in the Barcelona harbor to purchase our tickets for a ship leaving that night. Just as we were about to get in line, Joe pulled Ryan and me aside.

“I no Ibiza,” Joe said.

“What? Do you need to borrow money?” I asked, grabbing my wallet and showing him a few Euros to make my point.

“No. Money I own.”

“Then what’s the problem?” Ryan asked.

Abelena approached with her bag.

“Joe and I are going to go to San Sebastián together. It was very nice meeting you guys,” she said. Then she walked back to her friends, exchanged a few sentences in Spanish with them, and hugged them good-bye.

“Wow,” Ryan said.

“Yes,” Joe said.

“Well, it was really great meeting you, Joe,” I said.

“Yes. I want fun time for Justin. Fun time for Ryan,” he replied.

“Thanks, man.”

“I own sad,” he added.

“We own it, too, man,” I said.

I gave Joe my e-mail address. Then Ryan and I watched as he and Abelena walked out of the ferry station together.

After bumming around on the beach all day, Ryan, Eloisa, Anetta, and I boarded a dilapidated ship whose rusted exterior and cracked floorboards made it look like it should have been setting sail for Ellis Island in the summer of 1925. As we pulled away from the harbor, Ryan and I stood out on the bow.

“This is it, dude. We’re going to the party capital of the world. We have girls with us. Stuff is going to get crazy, and we have to get crazy with it. No excuses,” Ryan said.

“Totally,” I agreed.

We didn’t have enough money for a room on board, so the four of us slept in lounge chairs on the observation deck. Thirteen hours later, the sun smacked us across the face, waking us up just as we were approaching the island. Ibiza looked to be a series of hills, covered in small white Mediterranean homes, plunging down to a sandy beach lined with grand resorts and the turquoise ocean below. When we disembarked from the boat, we realized we had no idea where to go. All the other tourists grabbed taxis and drove off toward the resorts, but we couldn’t afford those rates, and we weren’t about to waste money on a cab. The streets were deserted and it was horror-movie quiet. We shrugged our shoulders, chose a direction almost at random, and started walking down a narrow street when suddenly a voice from behind us said, “You guys lost?”

Standing behind us was a bronzed American man in his late twenties, wearing baggy white pants, a pair of bright red shoes covered in sparkles, an electric-blue short-sleeve T-shirt that seemed to be made of Lycra, and a pair of Oakley-style sunglasses with fluorescent yellow lenses. He reminded me of an animal you’d see in a nature special about how the most dangerous species in the Amazon use their colorful markings as a warning to other animals.

“I can show you around. I need to walk off this E. I’m rolling balls so fucking hard right now,” he said, running his hands through his spiked hair, then popping his pinkie in his mouth and tugging on his cheek like a fish that’d been hooked.

With no real idea where we were going, we took him up on his offer, and headed off in the exact opposite direction from the one we’d chosen. As we walked, he explained that he lived on the island and worked as a promoter for a few different clubs.

“It’s my job to make sure the party is super-hot. If it’s not hot enough, I make it hotter,” he said as we walked down the boardwalk.

“So what’s the hottest party to go to in Ibiza?” Ryan asked.

“You can’t handle that party. If you touched that party, it would burn you.”

“Okay. Well, what about the second hottest party?” I asked.

“Still too hot for you,” he said.

“Just tell us a party that’s appropriately hot for us,” Ryan snapped.

He looked us up and down. “Club Pacha,” he said.

He led us to a hostel that sat at the end of a small alley, above an auto shop, and was on his way.

As soon as we got into our tiny single room, Eloisa and Anetta went into the bathroom together and threw on skirts and bikini tops. Then the four of us headed down to the beach. We spent the day lounging on the sand in front of a hotel and swigging from a small bottle of vodka we’d brought with us from Barcelona. Everything was going just as I’d hoped; even things I was normally self-conscious about seemed unimportant.

“So, I kinda have weird chest hair,” I said, as I removed my shirt.

“I like it. It looks like an eagle that’s grabbing another eagle,” Anetta said.

“Fuck yeah. It totally looks like a crazy eagle fight,” Ryan chimed in.

We knew we weren’t going to be able to afford drinks at the club, so that evening Ryan and I walked to a nearby liquor store, bought a couple dozen airplane-sized bottles of Skyy Vodka, Captain Morgan’s, and Jack Daniels, and stuffed them in our pants pockets so that it looked like we were wearing football pads. By the time our taxi arrived at Pacha, the four of us had downed several bottles each and my tongue was starting to feel numb. Before us was a big white building, with two large palm trees flanking the entrance and a wash of purple floodlights over the whole facade.

As other people gathered in front of the club, though, we started feeling out of place. Ryan and I were both wearing khaki slacks and I was wearing New Balance sneakers, whereas almost everyone around us was dressed in all-white clothing so skin-tight it looked like they were heading to a speed-skating competition. Standing next to them, I looked like an old man on the way to his grandson’s third-grade play.

“Man. Everyone looks like they’re from the future,” Ryan said.

We pushed past the front door and into a cavernous open room where the techno music’s pulsing bass smacked me in the face and vibrated through my body. The walls were twenty feet high and draped in white fabric; all around us, purple and white spotlights chased each other fast enough to give you motion sickness. In the middle of the room was a concrete dance floor packed with hundreds of sweaty bodies writhing around like they were going through heroin withdrawal. Sitting above the dancers in the DJ booth was a middle-aged bald man wearing a cape who periodically grabbed a strobe light and flashed it over the crowd. Even though we were standing on the outskirts of the dance floor, arms and legs flailed wildly and knocked into us every few seconds.

“Man, people dance really weird here,” I shouted as loud as I could, so that Ryan could hear me over the music.

“Come outside for a sec,” Ryan yelled back at me, then held his hand up to Eloisa’s ear and said something to her.

We walked away from the dance floor and up some stairs to a rooftop lounge where the music was quieter. A group of young people were smoking cigarettes in a huddle; in a booth nearby sat an obese man with a hairline that started at his eyebrows, with one incredibly attractive woman on his lap and two others on either side of him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Hmm. I don’t know.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Just dancing,” I replied.

“What’s your name?” she asked.

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

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

“Ecstasy? No.”

“Shit. Let’s do shots of 151.”

And that was the last thing I remembered.

The next day, at five P.M., I woke up in 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: