Sunday, January 30, 2011

How Old People Die

This is the story of the SECOND time I nearly died in a bathtub. This time it was in a foreign country.

Just under a year ago one of my best friends began his two-year tour in Germany. We’ll call him Ed. The last time I’d seen Ed he was leaving for Afghanistan about a year and a half before. Shortly after he arrived in Germany we all had a four-day weekend coming up and it was only an $80 plane ticket away so I decided to fly out to visit him. I invited another Marine who was stationed out here with me at the time. We’ll call him Scrotie McBoogerballs.

Well, Ed originally wanted to go to France but since he didn’t have a tourist passport yet we had to find a country to visit that had open borders with Germany. Austria being the closest, that’s what we decided. The plan was for me and Scrotie to fly into Munich and Ed was going to take a three-hour train there to meet us. We planned on staying a night in Munich and then renting a car to drive across the border into Austria. From there we were just going to play it by ear. 

Scrotie and I flew into Munich and met up with Ed as planned. We checked into our hotel room, got cleaned up and hit the town. The first night was pretty uneventful, save for the kid at our first stop gambling by himself; the bartender and his parents couldn’t have cared less. I tried not to judge him, I just told myself he was trying to make some headway in his college tuition. I guess the same way I justify my support for strippers. Ed and Scrotie weren’t getting along very well which was a bit disconcerting and kind of a buzz kill. 

Yes, that is a slot machine.

The next morning we get in the car and drove an hour and a half to Salzburg, Austria. We got there relatively early so we did the tourist-y stuff for most the day. 

Cell Phone Pic of Salzburg

We started the evening off with dinner at a small pub in the middle of town. When we sat down they gave us a basket of different types of bread as an appetizer. We order a round of beers and start looking at the menu. Not being able to read Austrian German (or German German for that matter), the only thing I can make heads or tails of is the cheese platter. Having an atypical affinity for bread and cheese, I’m not disappointed. The guys laugh at my choice of food considering the long night of drinking ahead of us but I completely disregard their criticism. I wouldn’t understand the implications of that decision until roughly nine hours later. 

We finished up dinner around six and started drinking at another pub. If you’ve ever had Hefeweizen (pronounced Hefeveisen) you know how easy it is to drink a couple liters and not even realize it. That shit is delicious. This pub was a hole in the wall but was the only one open that early. We hung out there, had a few rounds of hefeweizen and then moved on.
At this point it’s safe to say we were slightly impaired. 

Our next stop was at very contemporary looking bar. The inside was nice, decent crowd, seemed like a good place. We pick a table near the window at the front of the bar. From where we’re sitting we have a pretty good field of view into the place. Scrotie notices a pretty girl at the complete other end of the bar sitting by herself. We’ll call her Tina. You’ll know why in a second. We decided that Scrotie should go over and talk to Tina, he agrees. As he walks over, Ed and I chuckle thinking he’s going to be coming back to the table within the next 30 seconds. 

Much to our surprise, after a small exchange, Tina invites him to sit down. Ed and I think “Well shit, go Scrotie.” So about 10-15 minutes passes by and Scrotie is still not back. I look over just as they start to get up. It soon became clear why she was sitting alone. The first thing I notice is that Tina was easily a foot taller than Scrotie. His head barely came up to her shoulders. As Scrotie and Tina start to make their way over to our table I begin to notice she has several man-like features. She may or may not have been a post-op tranny, and not the hot kind like Kim Petras.


They sit down and we make small talk until finally we couldn’t stand it anymore. We held off as long as we could but Ed and I couldn’t resist asking her to hold her hand up so we could size them up to ours.

 This poor girl's pituitary gland had a mind of it's own. 

Trying not to be complete dicks we ask her if she’s a model (we know she’s not). She tells us that when she lived in California (explains her well-spoken English) she tried but they said she was too tall. No way, get the fuck outta here.

After about a half hour Tina says that she’s about to go to a club and invites us along. She says this club is very exclusive and that she would have to talk to the owner to get us inside. Sweet. We all get up, pay our tab and step outside. As we’re walking to the club, I start to feel like everyone is staring. 

This is what it was like.
 
We got to the club and were waiting outside for her to talk to the owner. Ed decided that it was too quiet outside and felt compelled to scream obscenities at a random passerby. The owner sees this and decides we’re not the caliber of people he wanted in his club. He probably made the right choice. Although considering the fact that he allowed Tina in was kind of insulting. 

So we leave Tina and move on to a really crowded place down the street. This is where the night takes a turn for the worst. We hung around for a while just talking to random people. We start talking with this group of girls who introduce us to several different kinds of shot mixes which was somewhat educational. We introduced them to tequila shots. I don’t know of a single time when tequila was ever a good idea. It turned into kind of a contest to see who could come up with the best shots. Nobody won.  

Somewhere in the middle of this I was approached by two dudes who looked like they belonged at a Star Wars convention.

 
 

They heard our American accents and felt it necessary to tell us how awesome we were for being Americans. They asked us what we did for a living and I told them we were U.S. Marines. At this point we had attained rock star status - which in reality is about as cool as coming in first place at a Dungeons and Dragons competition. 

Nobody ever truly wins at this either
 
While Ed and Scrotie were talking to people who were exponentially more socially adept, I spent the next hour trying to explain the concept of being willing to die for your country to a couple of guys who spend most of their time jerking off to Captain Kirk and texting each other in binary. Needless to say, I wasn’t having much luck. 

Shortly after the tequila shots I start to feel the effects. Over the next half hour I honestly started to feel like I was dying. I then made the best decision of the night and hailed a cab. I told the guys I was done and needed to stop drinking. I told Ed, who was equally inebriated, to get in the cab with me. Initially he got in but quickly decided he hadn’t had enough so he jumped out of the cab right as it began to pull away. 

Back at the hotel room I still feel like I’m going to die. I start trying to think of ways to save myself. Oddly, calling 911 (Probably a different number in Austria) never occurred to me. Eureka! Water, that was it; I needed to drink as much water as I could. In my drunken stupor I also make the connection between drinking water and being IN water and thought both were going to save my life.  So I filled the bathtub with water and quickly got undressed. I climbed in and laid there for a while.

 
Enter Scrotie.  

A couple hours later, Scrotie is the next one to come back to the room. He walks through the door (Bottom right of the picture) and comes around the corner. The first thing he sees is me lying in the bathtub and from what he can tell, I’m not breathing. He later told me that he was so convinced I was dead that he didn’t even rush to my aid. Just as he makes his way through the bathroom door, I start to snore. Completely relieved, he comes over to wake me up. The way I depicted myself in the bathtub is exactly how I was; spread eagle and butt ass naked, although not quite that skinny. To make things even more awkward, the plug that holds the water in the tub was really bad at its job so by the time Scrotie found me there was no water in the tub at all. He helped me up and made me go to bed. 

So I wake up the next morning, still butt naked and lying next to a slightly less naked Ed who had come back hours after Scrotie. I look to my right and the first thing I notice was the HUGE puddle of things my body didn’t want inside of it anymore. Scrotie wakes up around the same time and explains how he found me sleeping in the bathtub. Out of nowhere, Ed pipes up:

“Dude, don’t you know that’s how old people die?”

1 comment:

  1. first of all just let me say that i am not taking offense at your remarks about that tall woman. I prefer statuesque to "tall". but enough about me. I do, however, want to recommend that when you and your spouse decide to purchase a home - that your bathroom is without a tub or anywhere near your bedroom...just have a little tub for the kiddies. all in all, i very much enjoyed reading your escapade and tales of honor, drinking capacity and choice of bars. You are indeed a world traveler and social butterfly! take care and stay away from water in general.
    ms

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