Vaterland Part 5: Murphy’s Law

Well, I’m finally back in Florida, so hopefully these will come out a bit faster. If no one’s reading these, that’s fine, but I’m cluttering the blog up with them anyway.

Day 5

Today was on off-day. We had nothing planned, so I just hung out at the house for a while, playing guitar, beating my cousins at Guitar Hero, and starting on this log. For dinner, my aunt took us to the only restaurant in Germany where you can get a good steak, according to her. Apparently, Germans tend to cook steaks well done regardless of what you order; this restaurant, Die Kartoffel (The Potato), let you cook your meat yourself on heated stones. The food was pretty much orgasmic, especially the baked potato, which was slathered in the best sour cream I’d ever tasted.

Now, normally I hate sour cream. Along with cottage cheese, I’ve never been down with food products that are basically rotten dairy. But this stuff tasted different than any sour cream I’d ever had; it was so good that I could eat it by itself, which I did when I ran out of potato.

After dinner, my aunt dropped my cousins off at home and invited me to Murphy’s Law (the pub where I ate my first dinner in Germany) to have some drinks and meet a few of her friends. Both of these propositions sounded great to me, so I hopped in the car and prepared myself for some beer-y goodness.

The inside of Murphy’s was surprisingly cozy and inviting. The only bars I’d ever been to were in DeLand, Florida: noisy, crowded, smoke-filled places where the 70s rock blares and no one wants to have anything to do with anyone they don’t already know. This place was bright and clean, with BBC News playing on a mounted TV and cheerful drunken patrons meeting each other for the first time (or the thousandth time) and having a blast.

My aunt introduced me to three of her friends, all British contractors: Terrance, a bald and friendly Scotsman, Andrew, a lanky and inviting (if slightly dangerous) man from Manchester whom I never saw sober, and Timothy, a quiet Welshman who always had a smile on his face. All three were a little drunk by this time, and Andrew was very drunk, although my aunt told me that he wasn’t nearly as sloshed as she’d seen him many times before. For most of the next few hours, I drank Eichbaum talked with Terrance, who instantly treated me like an old friend. I learned a bit about what he did for a living: he and Andrew were both mechanics who worked for the US military on their heavy equipment, and they had both been “down range” (ie: to Afghanistan/Iraq) in the past few years. He told me about his life, what he loved about Germany, and gave me some assorted bits of lessons on life. These talks were interrupted every time Andrew wanted a smoke, at which time I would follow him outside, bum one off of him and hear him ramble stumblingly. Apparently, it was his birthday, and he was pissed (in the British sense of being super drunk, not the American sense of being angry). He asked me about a million times that night whether I smoked weed, apparently forgetting each time that I had already answered him before. He never offered any or anything; I guess he was just curious.

Around midnight, a couple of Boers from Petoria came in; with heavy Afrikkaner accents, they introduced themselves to our ever-expanding group and joined us. One of them, Jakob, must have been 6′10 and over 300 pounds; at one point, Terrance (who was quite well built himself) mock fought him, at which point Jakob picked him up and slung him on his shoulder like a sack of potatos. It was pretty surreal; I’d never seen a largeman quite so massive or quite so jovial before.

Later on, I somehow got into a conversation with Francois, an American who stayed in Germany after ending his military service in the 80s. He talked for what seemed like hours about his many odd jobs, the classes he was taking to handle hazardous waste, and other subjects that I couldn’t really get interested in. He told me that I should drop out of my four-year collge and go to various accredidation schools like him; I nodded along and went to take a piss. Another thing that made this pub better than any bar I’d seen: the bathrooms were pretty clean, and I didn’t feel like I was going to get herpes from stepping into it.

Finally, it came time to get home. My aunt, who was pretty sober by that time, offered to drive Terrance and Andrew, who were both very inebriated. As I watched them on the way home, my thoughts turned to Chuck Klosterman’s concept of the nemesis/rival, which he discussed in both of the books I’ve read from him. According to him, most people have someone who they measure their success against, who they secretly wish to fail (or who secretly wishes them to fail), or who they are constantly fighting with…but, in his words, “Your Nemesis can’t be Your Nemesis unless he is also Your Friend.” All night, I’d heard these two tell me separately that they were close friends, that they’d always look out for one another…but I never saw them once say or do anything nice towards one another. Sure, the atmosphere wasn’t entirely spiteful, but the two were constantly haranging each other, almost getting to the point of screaming about each other’s worthlessness.

My aunt parked at a gas station to get some cigarettes; Andrew bolted out of the door and started pissing on the wall next to the entrance, as the Politzei drove by on the main road. Terrance was yelling at him to get back in the car, you stupid drunk, and I realized that these men probably were nemeses, but that nemeses weren’t all that bad: when it comes down to the wire, they look out for each other.

We arrived home at about 2:00 AM. As I stumbled into the basement, my aunt promised me more drinking tomorrow: it was going to be July 4, after all. I was well aware of this fact; back at the pub, when midnight rolled on the Fourth, Andrew celebrated with a toast to “the day when Will Smith killed all those aliens.” I went to bed praising friendship, and reasonable drinking age laws.