Last India Overland (9 page)

“Panache,” he said. “Just the smallest touch of panache.”

I didn’t say anything. I don’t like my food to get cold.

He said, “All I’m suggesting is that since we are in vintage wine country, it does behoove us to seek out some grape product of high quality with which the ambience of our meals might be abetted somewhat, while, at the same time, assisting our digestive systems in their efforts at coping with the bratwurst and Wiener schnitzel that has been foisted upon us of late.”

I think what Patrick was saying was that he wasn’t a big fan of German food. I think he was blaming his constipation on sausage. But I had to make sure, so I asked him as much.

He said, “The digestive tract is very sensitive. I should know. My dear Aunt Martha was an authority on tracts. A Seventh Day Adventist, to be exact. She left tracts wherever she went.”

He grinned around at all of us but nobody even smiled this time.

Dana groaned, that was about it.

There’s nothing I hate worse though than to see someone’s jokes fall flatter than a pancake. I guess this comes from having an old man who was always cracking jokes. The old man, he had a joke for everything. If he’d survived that little visit to The Olde Salvador Deli I’m sure he would’ve come up with a joke for that too.

So I laughed at Patrick’s joke. Sort of.

“Har har,” I said.

Anyway, Patrick had this idea to go on a wine-buying spree in downtown Munich.

It was what Pete called a free day. Which usually meant anything but. It meant he got to drop us off in front of a lot of shops where he eventually got a little kickback.

That morning, Pete dropped us off near the Glockenspiel, a big clock, and told us to be back at the bus when the clock went off. It took us a while but me and Patrick finally found a place that sold cases of wine.

It was easy to figure out why Patrick had invited me along. He needed a slave.

Anyway, on the way back to the bus, Patrick spotted this hat in a window and he had to go in and try it on. He called it a poacher’s hat. One of these little plaid jobs with a high crown and a drooping brim. He tried a few angles and asked me what I thought of it.

“Makes you look like a regular Dr. Livingstone,” I said.

“Yes,” he said. “It does impart a certain adventuresome quality, somehow, to this homespun cranium.”

When he went to pay for it, though, there was a long lineup, so I told him just to heist it. I didn’t really mean it. Who needs the hassle of being picked up for shoplifting in Munich? But Patrick must’ve thought I was daring him to do it or something because he said, “A most pregnant suggestion, Mr. McPherson,” and we walked out of the store, just like that.

Patrick wasn’t finished shopping yet, though. In another store he bought ten rolls of toilet paper, which I thought was kind of funny.

“I thought you were constipated,” I said.

“All things must pass, Mr. McPherson,” he said. “One must be optimistic and prepare for all eventualities.”

It was a smart thing to do, as it turned out. Before the trip was over, I was buying toilet paper from Patrick at a hundred per cent mark-up. I guess it was his way of getting something back for all the wine of his I ended up drinking.

Wish he’d bought some Belgian toilet paper. German t.p.

is about as soft as sandpaper. It even has wood chips in it.

Another thing Patrick bought was a case of canned crab meat. “It should be quite pleasant to nibble on,” he said, “while we cross the burnished Afghani sands.”

We were five minutes late getting back to the bus but Pete didn’t say anything.

Not much happened the rest of the day. Pete took us over to the Deutsches Museum but I stayed in the bus and had a sip of wine, or two or three. I figured I deserved something for lugging Patrick’s booze and crab meat six blocks.

That night Pete drove us down to the Hofbrauhaus, which he said was the pub where Hitler used to rant and rave. It was about as big as a slaughter barn and chock-full of smoke and old Nazis drinking beer. Over in a corner was a band playing old Nazi marching tunes. Tim and Teach saw right away that this wasn’t their cup of tea and decided to go for a walk through the Marienplatz instead. The rest of us found a table that had this one lonely guy sitting at it. The place was so crowded it was the only place we could sit.

It wasn’t hard to figure out why the guy had the table to himself. He looked like the son of Frankenstein. He was a black dude with white hair and pink eyes. He had knots of muscle in his throat that looked like lug nuts. He was drinking a beer, and he just shook his head when Pete asked him if it was okay if we sat at his table. Pete took that to mean yes. We sat down and waited for a waitress. The waitresses were all about the size of Joe Frazier, though not as cute. They ploughed through the tables like winter oxen. I remember that line occurred to me.

Not too far away from us was a long table full of other tourists. They were having a boot contest. Each side of the table had a huge glass boot and the idea was to see which side would finish theirs first. They were all plastered and singing at the top of their lungs. Looked like they were having fun.

The idea behind our visit was a tad different. Pete told us that anybody who drinks six mugs of beer gets a special Hofbrauhaus medallion and his respect. Well, I didn’t give a damn about getting Pete’s respect, but I knew I couldn’t respect myself if I went back to Kits without one of those medallions.

It took a while, and some shouting, to finally get a waitress. 53

Like Patrick said, if this was the place where Hitler made his first speeches then it was easy to understand how he got into the habit of shouting.

And Rockstar was gung-ho on the idea of knocking back six mugs. Even if you had to use both hands to pick a mug up. By the time I’d finished my first mug, he’d downed two and he was asking Suzie to dance. “We’ll tell them to sing ‘Waltzin’ Matilda,’ ” he told her, and that got her up.

One of the funniest things on the trip was the sight of Rockstar doing a punk dance to “Waltzing Matilda” with Suzie in Hitler’s pub.

Then Dana asked Pete to dance, which upset me just a tad, and Jenkins took off somewhere, which left me and Patrick at this table alone with the freak. It was Patrick who asked him, in a real polite way, if he was a black albino.

The guy didn’t speak much English but Patrick knew a little German, and the story that came out is that this guy was born in a Nazi laboratory. Patrick told me this on our way back to camp. Pete had put buckets behind a few seats and Suzie was chundering up in one of them across the aisle from us.

Patrick had his new hat on and his cheeks were a rosy red. “He seemed to think,” Patrick said, “that he was the world’s first test-tube baby. Apparently the Nazis took the sperm from a black American soldier and the ovum from a Polish princess, mixed the two together in a stein and nine months later, presto, one Siggy Bortnik was born.”

Patrick had managed to drink six steins, just like me and Rockstar had (and what we got for it was this dinky little two-bit cap pin in the shape of a beer stein), and he thought what he said was real funny. Rockstar was sitting next to Suzie, yakking at her while he helped her keep her hair out of the bucket, and when he heard Patrick laughing, he said, “Hey, poofter, where’d you get the hat?”

Patrick ignored him.

“Hey, Muckle. What do you think of Patrick’s hat?” “Makes him look like a regular Dr. Livingstone,” I said. Patrick snorted. “Regular. I only wish.”

“Dr. Livingstone, huh?” said Rockstar. He’d been going on and on to Suzie about Charlie Putrid, about how Chuck gave him his Polaroid camera for his birthday and it was the first birthday present he ever got. “Dr. Livingstone, I presume!”

“When I asked him if he knew what happened to his parents,” Patrick said, looking right at Rockstar, making goggle-eyes at him above Suzie’s head but talking to me, “he said they were both melted down and made into lampshades. He said he has two of them in his bedroom.”

“A sentimental kind of guy, huh?” I said.

He said, “Indeed, Mr. McPherson. Very sentimental. And, perhaps, a bit of a prevaricator.”

Then we’re back in camp, and I’m watching Patrick saunter towards his tent. He’s walking just a little too close to Suzie. Real close. Even though they hadn’t been within ten feet of each other all night. I thought maybe it was because he was worried she might fall down.

And I’m watching Pete walk towards his tent with one arm draped over Dana’s shoulder. This is what happens when you don’t make your move quick. You’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t, and damned if you doesy-do, as the old man used to say. The square dance of life, he called it.

I’m in my sleeping bag, full of beer and full of regrets and almost asleep, when Rockstar says, “Muckle?”

“What is it, Rockstar?”

“What’cha think of Suzie?”

“Okay,” I said. If you like chubby little hedgehogs with big mouths, I almost said. “Why?”

“Just wonderin’,” he whispers, and then, in a soft quiet voice, he says goodnight, Muckle. Like he was almost human. Like he was in love or something. With Suzie, I mean.

Good thing Rockstar didn’t know what was going down, right about then.

Dana had gotten a little loaded and ended up seducing Pete, that was obvious, and so Patrick and Suzie had the tent to themselves and Suzie basically is one of these women who gets horny when she’s hammered and so she took advantage of Patrick, just like she did me, and I’ll explain how I know that when I get to Athens.

But what I was saying about women. They’ve got us wrapped around their little fingers. Just like Soon. She comes in every morning and she’s always so friendly and real concerned. Always got a smile on her face. She’s got this cute little turned-up nose and these black eyes that seem to twinkle with stars. These white perfect teeth and pink thin lips that I know would fit mine perfect.

This whole business between the sexes, what it comes down to is lip size. What it comes down to is the kiss.

First thing I think about every morning is kissing Soon.

Maybe this is fate. Maybe everything that’s happened to me is so I would end up here and meet Soon.

Helluva price to pay, though, my only right hand.

I could live on Ko Samui forever, if I could live with her.

But that’s my major problem. I fall in love too easily. I never learn. Because there hasn’t been once that I’ve fallen in love that I haven’t fallen into a lot of deep shit at the exact same time.

from Kelly’s diary

Oct. 15

It was maybe C’s cast that finally got us the ride to Cannes.

2 good-looking Spanish guys who asked us if they could buy us a glass of wine. The 1 guy had beautiful hazel eyes. C. said no. The beaches were tempting, & we did catch a couple of hrs. of sun, but the train, old & crowded with tourists, left at 3, & we took it as far as Verona, where suddenly the conductor came through & told us all to get off, the engineers had gone on strike. So we had a candlelight sandwich near Juliet’s tomb with a girl from Sweden who told us to be careful in Italy, the Red Brigade was running wild. Tonight we’re splurging on a pension, clean, not a roach in sight.

Mick

I woke up with a six-banger hangover the morning after our little visit to Hitler’s pub, and I thought about pancakes. The old man used to say beer pancakes were the best hair of the dog you could take for a six-banger hangover. So I say to myself, Mickers, you’re going to do yourself and a few other people a favour this morning.

Pete had bought about ten cases of Heineken in Munich and he’d stowed them in the undercarriage where it was cool.

When I’d seen him stowing the cases, I asked him if he was thirsty, and he said nope, they were just emergency supplies, that’s all.

Well, this was an emergency as far as I was concerned. So I heisted a few of his Heineken when he wasn’t looking. When he was over talking to Dana, getting all cow-eyed.

My old man used to make a great beer pancake. Every Sunday we had his beer pancakes for breakfast. He claimed he used the stale, leftover beers from Saturday night parties to make them, but he told us not to worry, he’d already strained all the cig butts and ashes from the beer.

But I guess I don’t have his skill with a skillet because my pancakes didn’t come out too well at all.

Teach put one forkful in her mouth and did her best to spit it into a hanky in a way that no one would notice.

That hurt my feelings.

As for Teach, well, I guess it was kind of an omen for the kind of day she was going to have.

“What did you put in the pancakes?” she said, when she saw that I’d seen her.

I shrugged. “Just a little beer,” I said.

She stared at me with her basic look of disbelief, and then got up from the table and stalked off to the ladies’ loo.

After breakfast Pete came up to me and said, “Another meal like that, mate, and you’re going to be on dishwashing duty for the rest of the trip.”

And he threw me onto dishwashing duty with Tim deLuca. It was supposed to be Dana’s turn.

“Quite the pancakes,” Tim said to me after we’d washed five or six plates without saying anything to each other. I was steamed at Pete and so I wasn’t feeling too friendly.