Addiction comes in many forms
By James McKean
There is nothing more ear-shattering, strange and terrible than the hammering noise of one thousand sunburned, pissed off American tourists charging down Broad Street.
Let’s be optimistic and say it’s only six o’clock in the evening – the true bender hasn’t started quite yet, but they’re still roaring drunk anyway, bombed out of their chubby little skulls and pumping at the melted concrete under their feet (which have transformed into hissing pistons) in their conquest of rage towards the Kings Arms.
We were just finishing up a couple of old roll-ups outside it when they loomed up on the horizon – those wild animals, cameras flashing wildly in the dim twilight, with their angry bloated faces leering up at us. They came rushing up towards the pub like some terrible waterfall.
And before my drunken companion could even begin to raise some kind of cry in protest, we were carried off, like dolls, the both of us, away into the hot night.
“What the hell are they going to do with us, man?!” I remember asking my drunken companion. He was being carried by one of the smart ones, but with a very mean look in his eyes.
“They’re stonking drunk and they’re pissed!” He yelled over their own impassioned bawling, “They say they’ve spent the whole fucking day trying to track down the University. No goddamn idea where it is, evidently.”
“The University? Sweet Jesus, but it’s all around us, man!” I said, “What the hell are we going to do?”
But it was too late. Before long they had us tied up and trussed up like turkies in some awful hotel room, and they’d had enough.
They asked us where the University was again, and we said we didn’t know.
They asked us if we were lying and we said hell no. Then one of the scrawny ones pulled out some slimy, fish-like object and started slapping my drunken companion around the head with it.
The poor bastard had been necking that 8% Dragon snake poison shit, the kind you can buy for less than £2 at Wetherspoons, since 6 am that morning, and all the poor fucker wanted to do was have a wander around the goddamn university.
As I sank into some booze and fear-induced stupor I let my drunken companions love cries wash over me as the other American tourists really let him have it.
Where the hell was the University, I remember thinking to myself.
Maybe these Barbarians from across the Atlantic have got something to say about that after all.
It wouldn’t have killed that Hamilton fucker; the one caught up in all the arms deals, to put up a fucking sign, or something. Or even a fucking update on his goddamn Twitter feed, or a press release, or something. Jesus, was that too much to ask?
Probably, yes.
But back to the point- they would be waking up from their drug-induced coma sooner or later, those goddamn tourists. And I sure as hell didn’t want to be around when they came to. So I slipped out of the loose ropes and dead snakes they’d bound me up with, did the same to my drunken companion, and then we were clattering down Cornmarket in the high heels we’d lifted from Primark earlier that week. It was a long walk back to College and I had an essay on that Greek bastard who wrote Don Juan to hammer out.
They truly are the foulest swine in the desert – or in this case the festering urban jungle of the so-called goddamn Dreaming Spires, whatever the hell that sack-of-shit moniker is supposed to mean.
Thinking of those terrible amoebas roll and loll over like a over-fed, bloated and nauseating seals, it’s enough to make me spit out one of my smokes and vomit all over the goddamn place.
Yes, they were probably the worst of their kind…worse than Nixon, that was for sure. Bastards probably voted for him.
We’d gotten away from those crazed, drug-addled transatlantic bastards this time, but next week we might not be so lucky.
There’s only one way to handle those tourists – carry some chloroform around everywhere you go and never take your eyes off those crazy fuckers – or you’ll live to regret it.
-Hunter S Thomspon
PHOTO/RambergMediaImages
