Sleeping Around

by Brian Thacker

  After washing my normal-sized underpants I rode into town to the Field Museum of Natural History, which was so big that I spent three hours wandering around before I even got out of the stuffed-birds-in-glass-cases section. The museum has 6 acres of display area and more than 20 million exhibits. Besides 65-million-year-old Sue, ‘The biggest and most complete Tyrannosaurus Rex ever found’, which was in the entrance foyer of the museum, all I saw were lots of blue-footed boobys, duck-billed flibbets and an impressive bugeranus.

  After the birds I only had enough time to quickly stampede through the jungles of Africa and skip around the totem poles of Native America, because I was meeting Bob for a beer by the shore of Lake Michigan. We met at the front of the Adler Planetarium, which was easy to locate with its domed roof bulging like a blister on a fingertip at the end of a peninsula reaching into the lake.

  Getting down to the shore wasn’t so easy, though. A belting wind coming off the lake kept forcing us back. The eye-watering gale was so strong that it was creating 2-metre high waves on the lake. When I could actually see through my teary eyes, the view was spectacular. Ranks of huge, granite skyscrapers soared skywards and towered over Lake Michigan, which stretched out steel-grey and steel-cold like a Chicago skyscraper turned on its side.

  It was taking all my strength to stay upright against the buffeting wind. ‘This is great, isn’t it?’ Bob squealed over the shrieking wind. Even the beer in my can was swirling around as if in a storm.

  ‘Yeah, fantastic,’ I hollered back.

  We lasted three minutes before we gave up and jumped back on the bikes.

  Bob rode like a maniac through the Gotham-like business district, weaving in and out of traffic, nipping in front of buses and playing chicken with taxis. We zoomed past the gleaming-white Wrigley Building (as in the chewing gum company), zipped past the oddly striking Tribune building and broke the two-minute mile down the Magnificent Mile, which glittered like most places where great wealth is spent and displayed.

  By the time we reached the John Hancock building, I had learnt three important facts: Chicago’s name comes from a local Indian language meaning ‘skunk’, Chicago produced the world’s first pinball machine, and Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer is a Chicago native because a copywriter from a local department store created him for one of its promotions.

  We made our way up to the Observatory Bar on the 94th floor of the John Hancock Building, but we didn’t stay long. Bob, sounding very much like Jake Elwood, said: ‘We’re not staying here. The fuckin’ beers are ten dollars!’

  On the way home to Bob’s we stopped at a super-sized supermarket so I could buy the ingredients to make a risotto. I certainly knew I was in America when we walked down an entire aisle devoted to Jell-O.

  ‘Shall I get enough food for Carl and Jason as well?’ I asked Bob while I searched for a packet of risotto rice that wasn’t ‘ready-to-serve, looks-just-like-vomit premixed risotto’.

  ‘Jason doesn’t do dinner,’ Bob explained drily.

  I was yet to meet Jason. I’d only heard him coming in late at night banging doors and stumbling about in the kitchen.

  ‘There’s something going on with him,’ Bob said. ‘He gets trashed just about every night. I don’t know whether to be annoyed or worried.’

  Like all good Americans, Bob and Carl ate their dinner on the couch in front of the TV. But totally unlike all other good Americans, they didn’t have cable. ‘We’re probably the only people in America without it,’ Bob said. ‘Even poor white trash have cable.’ While Bob and Carl watched some political news show, I flicked through the Chicago Tribune. Hidden away on page seven, next to a story about a cat caught up in a tree, was the headline: ‘America’s population about to reach 300 million’. I pointed out the small article to Bob, who said that when America’s population reached 250 million, the entire country had celebrated and the papers were filled with pictures of America’s 250 millionth resident: a nice white American baby from somewhere like Idaho. The Tribune article pointed out that the 300 millionth American would most likely be born in Los Angeles to a Mexican mother, or was even more likely to be a Mexican walking across the border.

  At around 12 per cent of the population, the Mexicans now made up the largest group of US immigrants from a single country. The census bureau predicted that by 2050 Mexicans (and other Hispanics) will make up more than 25 per cent of America’s population.

  ‘I’m not racist and my best friend is Mexican,’ said Bob when I read him the figures. ‘But they have to do something about all the Mexicans pouring in or this country’s gonna burst.’

  ‘Maybe we could send them to Australia,’ Carl said. ‘You’ve got plenty of space.’

  One of the major drawbacks of couch surfing is that you have to wait till everyone in the house goes to bed before you can jump in yours. There’s also the danger that you could surprise the hell out of someone who doesn’t know you’re there. After three days I finally met Bob’s brother Jason when he staggered in and almost fell on top of me. I was just as surprised as he was, not least because with his long unkempt hair and dimple-less smile, he looked nothing like his clean-cut brother.

  ‘Whoth HELL are you?’ he slurred while rocking from side to side.

  ‘I’m Brian from Australia.’

  Jason stared hard at me for a minute. ‘Right.’

  He then collapsed in a heap on the floor.

  ‘Let’s go canoeing and drinking!’ Bob urged excitedly. Bob had a day off work, so we jumped in his ‘truck’ and drove south for an hour to Bob’s hometown of Elgin to pick up his canoe. I would also get the chance to notch up another couch, because we were going to stay at Bob’s mum’s house.

  Not long after leaving the sprawling suburbs of Chicago, we were rolling through a quintessential mid-western farming landscape with low wooded hills, green pastures, cornfields, large farmhouses and even larger barns. On the way into Elgin we picked up 21 Buds: a box of twenty bottles of Bud Light, plus Bob’s friend Bud. ‘Bud doesn’t work,’ Bob told me. ‘He’s white trash and he lives with his drunk dad.’

  After picking up our collection of Buds, we grabbed Bob’s large aluminum canoe and a fold-up bike from his mum’s house. She lived in a street full of grandiose houses with neat lawns and oversized American cars parked in the driveway. Bob’s dad had passed away and his mum was visiting her sister, so we had the house to ourselves.

  Not far out of Elgin we turned off the main road—which was called Sleepy Hollow Road—and drove deep into a forest of silver maples, sycamores and willow trees before stopping right on the edge of the slow-moving Kishwaukee River.

  It was a perfect day for a paddle. And to drink beer, Bob and Bud assured me. Although the day was cool, the sun was warm and the only sounds were the gentle gurgle of the river and the frequent click and hiss as Bob and Bud opened another bottle of beer. While we floated merrily down the stream, Bob and Bud began talking about their old school friends. ‘Hank was making five thousand dollars a week selling grass, then he went on to crack cocaine and now he’s fucked,’ Bob said.

  Bud had asked another old school friend Ryan to come canoeing with us, but he couldn’t because he had an AA meeting. ‘He’s the funniest guy after a few beers,’ Bud said. ‘But by his seventh beer he just sits and stares at you, then pisses himself. He’s pissed on all his friend’s couches.’

  ‘Remind me not to couch surf with him,’ I said musingly.

  ‘Everyone had enough of finding their couch wet and smelly,’ Bud continued. ‘So at a party one night we decided to get him back. When he collapsed drunk in the backyard, six of us pissed on him.’

  For long periods we sat in silence simply enjoying the view. Now and again Bob or Bud would point out local fauna including geese, beavers, herons, kingfishers and a particularly quiet screeching owl.

  With all the beer being consumed, Bob and Bud kept having to stand up to pee out of the canoe. At one point Bob was letting loose a rather impressive stream into the
river when we floated around a bend into the full view of a couple fishing on the bank. ‘You better put that little worm away or I’ll put it on my hook,’ the woman called out cheerfully.

  Three and a half hours—and seventeen bottles of beer— later we came to a stop at a deserted picnic area. I’d had three beers while Bob and Bud had downed seven each. ‘I’ll be back real soon,’ said Bob before he headed off on the clunky-looking fold-out bike to get the car. I grabbed a beer and settled in for a long wait, but Bob was back in twenty minutes. We’d basically done a big loop and the car was only 2 miles away.

  After dropping off Bud, we picked up a famous Chicago deep-dish pizza from Pappa Saverio’s Chicago Deep Dish Pizza House. When we got back to the house with the ominous-sounding Meat Locker Pizza and opened the box, I burst out laughing. It wasn’t a pizza. It was a 10-centimetre high monolith of food with thick geological layers of cheese, tomatoes, minced beef, piles of bacon, more cheese, salami, onion, ham and a thick crust stuffed with even more cheese. ‘This should be called a Cholesterol Locker!’ I chuckled. The pizza was cut into eight slices, but I was full after just one. I had to force myself to have a second slice. I was so bloated that I couldn’t get off the couch, so it was lucky it was also my bed. Mind you, I could have chosen another one. There were four couches in three separate living areas. Before I considered a move, however, I had a question for Bob. ‘Has Ryan pissed on any of them?’

  On the way back to the city we stopped and picked up 300 beers. Bob was throwing a party at his apartment and he was providing two kegs of beer. ‘What’s the party for?’ I asked as we loaded the kegs into the back of the truck.

  ‘To try and get laid, man,’ Bob enthused. ‘Why else would anyone throw a party?’

  ‘There’s no theme or anything then?’

  ‘Sort of,’ Bob said. ‘It’s a pre-Halloween party.’

  Halloween was still more than three weeks away.

  Bob was expecting around 80 beer-drinking friends to his pre-Halloween party. ‘It’s mostly thirty-year-old school teachers, a few hicks from Elgin and a couple of hipsters,’ Bob said.

  We spent most of the afternoon stringing up faux cobwebs, hiding ghoul faces in the toilet and placing black candles into dark corners. Then Bob turned one of the kegs, rather impressively I thought, into a skeleton with the beer hose coming out of its mouth and its arm as the pump. Bob dressed up in a very suave 70s chocolate-brown three-piece pinstriped suit with magnificently wide lapels and even wider flares. He topped off his dashing ensemble with a super-wide brown- and cream-striped tie and big 70s sunglasses.

  Most of the party guests, and a few vampires and ghouls, had turned up by nine o’clock and by ten the party was in full swing. The DJ blasted out ‘60s and 70s underground funk’ and the lounge room heaved with dancing demons. The party was like the United Nations as I chatted with folk from France, Germany, Bangladesh, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Argentina, Morocco and a rather intoxicated fellow who wasn’t quite sure where he was from. He started to tell me the story four times. ‘I was in Dubai and . . .’ was as much as I got out of him before he fell asleep on the couch. Like a protective father, I’d been hanging around the couch making sure no one spilled any beer or cigarette ash on my bed.

  Bob was the life of party as he danced, flirted and threw himself into heated and deeply analytical arguments about politics. ‘The Democrats are fuckers,’ bellowed one of Bob’s friends.

  ‘Yeah, but we have to vote for one of them,’ Bob argued. ‘And the Republicans are a lot bigger fuckers.’

  Bob was in the middle of another political debate when his best friend Marco interrupted. ‘You need to go to the front door,’ he said. ‘There’s a gang of hoods who say they’re coming into the party.’

  The ‘gang of hoods’ was four twenty-something Puerto Ricans and one of them claimed that they could come into the party because his mum owned the building. Bob politely told them to shove off.

  Five minutes later there was a piercing scream from the street and moments later a couple stumbled up the stairs. The girl, who was whimpering in shock, had blood pouring out from her nose. They had just arrived at the party and the hoods had jumped on the girl’s boyfriend and began beating him. She tried to drag one of them off and he swung around and hit her in the face. Bob shouted something about ‘dirty motherfuckers’ then, looking fervidly around the room, grabbed a frying pan and ran downstairs. Carl and Marco bolted out after him—minus any large cooking implements.

  Almost the entire party (except the drunk Dubai fellow) raced to the window to see a bellowing Bob tearing towards the hoods as they clambered into their old brown Chevy Caprice. They were all in the car except one, who turned around and reached into his jacket.

  ‘He’s got a gun!’ someone gasped.

  The entire party dropped to the floor and I spun around to see dozens of people feverishly stabbing out 911 on their mobile phones.

  ‘It’s okay, he doesn’t have a gun,’ someone else yelled. ‘And he’s getting in the car.’

  No he wasn’t. Bob was dragging him out of the passenger window. Everyone in the party was now watching what looked like a scene from the TV series Mod Squad. Bob in his pinstripe suit and glasses was wildly punching through the window of the old brown Chevy while 70s funk music was still playing loudly in the background. The mild-mannered real estate agent Marco had pulled another hood from the car and was sitting on top of him and punching the now squealing gang member in the side of the head.

  Meanwhile the driver decided that he’d had enough and he was getting out of there. He would have too, if he hadn’t hit the accelerator too hard and careered into the side of a parked Volkswagen then slammed into the side of a dumpster. Carl was standing behind the car now, so he had nowhere to go. Well, that’s what we all thought until the car suddenly reversed and thundered into Carl, throwing him into a sprawling heap on the road.

  A bunch of us ran downstairs and by the time we got to the street a wailing police car with lights ablaze was pulling up in front of the Chevy. Now it was really like a TV police drama as two police officers jumped out and, with accompanying shouting and gesturing, pointed their guns at the hoods. Within a few minutes two more police cars and six more police officers were at the scene, and bundling the hoods into police cars.

  Carl was still lying on the road and clutching his leg in pain. Then I saw why. A broken bone was poking out of his trousers. ‘I don’t want an ambulance,’ Carl moaned. An ambulance was quickly on the scene because there was a hospital two doors up from Bob’s place. ‘I don’t want to pay for the ambulance. I can walk there,’ Carl said, trying to get up. Not surprisingly, the ambulance officer wouldn’t let him move and hoisted him into the back of the ambulance for the 50-metre drive up the road. You have to hand it to the Americans, though, they’re great motivators. What other country has a health system that motivates people with broken legs to get back on their feet straightaway?

  I found Bob sitting on the back of his truck nursing a bleeding finger. ‘The fucker tried to chew it off,’ he sniffed as he showed me the large gash on his finger.

  The party fizzled out rather abruptly after that brief interlude of pandemonium. I didn’t mind, though. After I’d thrown Mr Dubai off the couch, I was in bed by 2.30.

  ‘Thanks for organising the gang violence last night,’ I said to Bob as we drove to the airport.

  ‘You did tell me that you wanted to get to know the locals,’ Bob said with a wry smile.

  ‘Do you normally have trouble with the gangs?’ I asked.

  ‘Nothing like this has ever happened to us before,’ Bob said. ‘The gangs don’t usually hassle us, they just fight other gangs.’ The police told Bob that the gang was part of the Young Latino Cobras (which is not to be confused with the Spanish Insane Cobras).

  ‘They have all sorts of weird-ass names,’ Bob said. Other weird-ass Chicago gang names include the Looney Toon Crew, the Krazy Getdown Boys and The Insane Popes.

  Wh
en I spoke to Bob a few months later, he’d just been talking to a friend who he hadn’t seen since the fateful night. His friend said, ‘The last time I saw you, you were running out the door with a frying pan in your hand screaming bloody fucking murder!’ Until then, Bob had forgotten all about his choice of weapon, which had mysteriously vanished.

  ‘My brother and I have been speculating ever since that night,’ Bob told me, ‘wondering what kind of asshole steals a frying pan from a party.’

  CANADA

  9

  ‘On the weekends I let my beard grow, fix cars, cut down trees, drink beer and get out of control with my buddies.’

  Jeremy Ribbinck, 27, Kitchener, Canada

  CouchSurfing.com

  You may very well wonder why I chose Kitchener as my Canadian couch-surfing destination. I could have elected to surf in vibrant Toronto, the centre of Canadian culture and media; or rugged Calgary, nestled in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains; or European-flavoured Québec City, bristling with historic buildings; or even charming Montreal with its old-world atmosphere. The couch-surfing hosts of Kitchener weren’t exactly glowing with praise:

  Kitchener really isn’t all that great I must admit but hey, for all you odd birds who want to come here—my place is open. :)

  Natasha, 27

  I would love for you to come, as I love meeting travellers, but I’m warning you that there is absolutely NOTHING to do in this poor excuse for a town.

  Caroline, 23

  But despite the locals’ lack of enthusiasm, there were two things that drew me to this somewhat nondescript provisional city in the middle of nowhere: sausages and beer. Kitchener is home to the second largest Oktoberfest in the world after Munich and my visit just happened to coincide with the week-long celebrations. Caroline might have said that there was absolutely nothing to do in Kitchener, but she obviously wasn’t a fan of doing the chicken dance and eating Kartofelpuffers.