Budapest Fight Club

I had been drinking since 5pm, and that meant I’d been drinking for 5 hours. The hostel was boring, and I had finished enough work to feel good about myself, so I avoided both the boredom and the chance that I’d do anything else productive by aggressively mixing Ballentine’s with the ginger ale Kelsi had stolen from Otter 2. By 9pm I was tipsy, and we were playing King’s Cup and Gabriel had brought a bottle of wine. It was a dry expensive red contrasting with all the cheap sweet whites we’d been drinking. When I poured it, Jean and Gabriel looked at each other and Jean informed Gabriel, “He’s not French.” Apparently all French understand that to avoid dripping and wasting any wine you turn the bottle as you end your pour.

Jean also told me that wine was not for getting drunk. He had shared this Parisian wisdom one night a few weeks before when I was sad and purchased a 2 euro bottle from the 24-hour store and was draining it without even using a glass. I smiled a Matt Berninger smile and disagreed with him.

The French were right about one thing tonight, though. Gabriel whispered to Jean while I emptied my third glass, “This is not going to end well.”

It didn’t. Not for any of us. By the time we left the hostel I lacked the capacity to even hold onto my cigarettes. I dropped them constantly in between drags, worrying Jean but also making him laugh. “Are you alright, darling?” He always called us darling, and with his accent it was endearing. We became close friends out of necessity, both university dropouts and both traveling alone and both roaring drunks on most nights. The major difference between us was that Jean readily slipped his lips around the lips of Finnish and Swedish and Estonian girls and led them back to empty beds in the hostel, while I was in love with a girl in the states who I naively expected to marry.

Even after all the nights I spent at Szimpla Pub, I still only sort of knew how to get there, and had I not been with the group there’s a strong probability I would never have made it. The place was like my home in Hungary, though, and I wanted to show my American guests and new co-worker Kelsi my residence and its 2 euro beers and found object decor. Kelsi had been in Krakow before coming to Budapest but lived in Eugene, Oregon. She was a hippie and I loved her. Her stories were about things like exploring abandoned hospitals in Germany, and she was an artist and went for a bath one night and came back with a different hair color. The other Americans were guests and the basic girls from Jersey who you see in reality shows but don’t believe actually exist. Big hair and low necklines and flirty and teaching English in Spain. Casey and Olivia were their names, I think.

It was sometime around midnight when we got to the bar. A ruin pub in the Jewish district of Budapest, historic for the holocaust and the downfall of communism, Szimpla had a few different areas. We always spent time on their patio-circus-tent thing, even though it was winter and a stiff cold gripped Hungary most nights, because even when I “quit smoking” Jean didn’t. I was wearing my chucks and my hip thrift-store sweater and felt great about being an American vagrant private university dropout casually drinking himself to death in Budapest. I think. That’s how I felt most of the other nights at the clubs in Budapest. I was volunteering in Otter hostel for a free bed and breakfast and sort of working in web design and content writing and seeing sights and eating 2 euro kebabs every day and going to Szimpla or Fogas Haz pubs and the club Instant every goddamn night. I think I had six beers a night for the six weeks I was there. I loved it and never threw up and danced from 12am to 6am with Jean and whatever girls we happened to meet.

I don’t remember how I felt this night, though.

I don’t even remember going to the bar. I started blacking in and out as soon as we left the hostel. All I can really tell you is that I have a memory of a feeling — a feeling of being far too drunk to have fun and deciding I should go home. I didn’t tell my friends and I didn’t walk with anyone. I put earbuds in and listened to The War On Drugs while I staggered back to Jokai Ter. How I found my way I’ll never know. The memory is gone and even though I’ve heard hypnosis can bring back memories even from past lives I think this one drowned in single-malt whisky and red wine. I just remember I was close to the door. Maybe a block away from the elevator and the fifth floor and my bunk underneath Kelsi’s and next to Emily’s.

They were a group of men who didn’t look like tourists. I think five of them. I stumbled through them like a lanky bowling ball and the last one caught me. He secured me until I was more or less standing. “You alright?”

I said yes and thanked him and tried to direct my rubber body in the direction of Otter Hostel. Then I felt in my pocket. My wallet was missing. It could’ve been lifted at the bar. Hell, I could’ve left it on the counter when I asked for a beer. Or those locals could’ve picked it when they helped me find my footing.

I got angry. Those fuckers! They knew a foreigner when they saw him raging drunk through their streets. Americans stumble differently, because even when they don’t collide with anyone they’re still a bigger inconvenience than other countries. Too much bombast, even in an ethylic stupor.

“You took my wallet!” I shouted. I was helplessly drunk and getting stupid.

Motor Skills rapidly regressing to uncontrollable exaggerated movements.

Eyesight distorted like a funhouse mirror.

Logic fading to the point of attacking a group of sober men alone in a country where I knew how to say hello, goodbye, thanks and beer.

I charged into the group. Then I blacked out again.

I came to lying on the street, the whisky keeping me warm and unfeeling, and I didn’t know where I was or why I was moving my arms to cover my head and bringing my knees to my chest armadillo-style. Then suddenly a thud and an explosion of dull pain against the side of my face.

I realized this wasn’t the first time they’d hit me, but I was covering up and could take another one if I had to. I clenched my teeth.

Black out again.

Three faces peering down at me. A twentysomething with a beard and two girls on either side of him with angelic concern and perfect English. “Are you ok?” He asked when he lifted me up. No, those bastards had taken my wallet. Where are they? I scanned the sidewalks. It was late. People were out and going to clubs and having better nights than me. My phone was gone. And so were the locals who just won their five-on-one match with a drunk American.

Would I be ok they asked? Yes, I’d be ok. I live here.

I hope I thanked them, but I don’t remember. They saved me.

The three English angels walked me back to my hostel, and after several tries I entered the code and came into the light of the elevator lobby. Jean and Gabriel would find drops of my blood in front of the door the next morning. It wasn’t until I was on the fifth floor telling Emily that I just got mugged and had to Skype my parents and cancel my credit cards and could she get my frozen vegetables from the kitchen because the lump on my head was bleeding and swelling that I noticed them. Cuts across my knuckles. It looked like I had hit someone.

It looked like I had started a fight with five men in Budapest and gotten the shit beat out of me by those five men and they took my wallet and phone for their trouble. It looked like I was making poor decisions with my life. It looked like whatever I was trying, I was failing.

It looked that way because that’s what had happened, was happening, and would continue to happen. Broke, drunk, and chipped teeth in fucking Budapest, fighting off adulthood about as well as I could fight off five Hungarians.

Jean and Casey walked in next and Jean lost it. “Darling! Why did you walk home without me!” He ran over to examine me, holding a bag of frozen carrots to my blood-soaked head and slowly sobering up.

I found out later he wasn’t planning on walking home with me, anyway. He was going to fuck Casey. He even still tried later, after all the craziness had passed. One by one everyone else filtered into the hostel, except for Olivia who didn’t get back until 8 that morning. Gabriel had gotten kicked out of Szimpla while I had been getting beat on the street. They thought he had been selling drugs and told him never to come back. Kelsi called me a badass, and Emily played mother, and I bled all over my pillow that night and woke up with a hangover and bruises. The hostel owner told me not to tell anyone because I’d scare the guests.

Maybe I should’ve stayed in Nashville, I thought. Maybe I should’ve stayed in school, I thought.